In the Presence of Mine Enemies (37 page)

Cox grunted. “Well, I don't suppose I really could have expected you to say anything else. But you've got to have some kind of idea about how things will work out. You're a hell of a lot closer there than we are here.”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Heinrich answered, and he might even have meant that. “But I'm afraid I don't. The person who sets policy, whom I mentioned a moment ago, is the
Führer,
no one else. When he decides what he wants to do, we will do it.”

“Do it to us,” Cox muttered in English. Heinrich was less fluent in that language than, say, Susanna Weiss, but he spoke it well enough. Even though the Empire ran on German, English came in handy for dealing with Americans. Charlie Cox had just put his life in Heinrich's hands.

“Sooner or later, we will all see what the
Führer
has in mind,” Heinrich said. While true, that was unlikely to be comforting. “In the meantime, I suggest you pay your assessments promptly. That way, there won't be any unfortunate incidents both sides might regret.”

“Incidents we would regret a hell of a lot more than the
Reich
does.” Cox dared say that in German.

“Probably,” Heinrich agreed. “The losing side does have a way of regretting incidents more than the winners.”

“If we didn't know that already,
Herr
Gimpel, the past forty years would have proved it to us,” Cox said. “
Auf wiedersehen
.” He hung up.

From his desk a couple of meters away, Willi Dorsch asked, “The Americans?”

Heinrich nodded. “Oh, yes. Did you expect anything else? They want to see how much they can get away with, too.”

“Who doesn't, these days?” Willi said. “If we had any Jews left, they'd be trying to persuade us they were good Aryans, too.” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

Heinrich laughed, too. But the shriek inside didn't go away. One of these days, he would have an ulcer—or a stroke. A stroke had killed his father. Things came back to haunt you one way or another.

Ilse set some envelopes and a small package on his desk. “Morning mail delivery,
Herr
Gimpel,” she said.

“Thank you,” he answered, hardly looking up.

She went over to Willi's desk and gave him the same sort of stuff. “Here's yours, Willi,” she purred in a bedroom voice.

“Thanks, sweetie.” He made as if to grab her. Laughing, she spun away.

Heinrich punched keys on his calculator with altogether needless violence.
If you're going to have an office romance, can't you at least pretend you're not?
he wondered.
It makes life easier for everyone around you—especially people who know your wife
.

A moment later, another question crossed his mind.
Am I angry at Willi, or am I just jealous?
He shook his head. He didn't want Ilse. But the idea of having his choice between two women he did want…He shook his head again, annoyed at himself for poking beneath the surface. Purely in the abstract—or so most of him insisted—he liked that idea pretty well.
Maybe I am jealous of Willi after all
.

 

Alicia Gimpel liked the idea of a new year that began around the end of summer, a new year that corresponded to the beginning of the new school year. She liked it so well, she wished she could talk about it with her sisters and her friends. But her mother and father had both warned against that. “You never can tell who might be listening, or what they might know,” her father had said. She could see how that made sense, but she didn't like it.

On the day the new school year started, she and every
body else who'd put up with
Herr
Kessler seemed happy enough even without a real New Year's celebration. At the bus stop, Emma Handrick said, “I feel like they just let me out of a camp. Whatever happens now, it can't be worse.”

“He was awful, all right,” Alicia agreed. She turned to Francesca, who stood close by. With a big-sisterly combination of concern and sadism, she said, “Maybe
you'll
have him next year.”

“You're mean!” Francesca said shrilly. “I've got
Frau
Koch this year. Isn't that bad enough?”

“Getting stuck with the Beast is pretty bad, all right.” Alicia spoke with sincere but detached sympathy. She hadn't been unlucky enough to have
Frau
Koch herself.

Emma said, “I wonder what this
Herr
Peukert is like. He's new. Nobody knows anything about him yet.” The noise of a motor made her look down the street. She nodded to herself—the bus was coming. “Whatever he's like, he can't be worse than Kessler.” She spoke with the conviction of someone who'd been paddled more often than she thought she should have.

The schoolyard held more confusion than usual that morning, with students lining up in front of unfamiliar rooms—and with new kindergartners not sure they should line up at all. Their teachers came out early and shouted them into place. Alicia smiled at the little kids from the height of just-turned-eleven. It had, of course, been a million years ago when
she
had so little idea of what to do. Even Roxane was starting first grade now.

“Guten Morgen, Kinder.”
A man's voice close by made Alicia forget the kindergartners and her little sister, too.

“
Guten Morgen, Herr
Peukert,” she said, along with the rest of the fifth-graders in her line. Somebody—she couldn't see who—said, “
Guten Morgen, Herr
Kessler,” out of habit. That drew a few giggles from children close by, but the chorus must have drowned it out for the new teacher, since he didn't react.

Alicia sized him up. He was very tall—within a couple of centimeters of two meters. Was he taller than her father? She thought so. The resemblance ended with height.
Herr
Peukert was blond and bronzed and broad-shouldered. He
held himself so straight, he might have had a ramrod in place of his spine.

Behind Alicia, Emma breathed, “Oh! Isn't he gorgeous?”

Under the new teacher's ice-blue stare, several of the boys in line tried to stand straighter themselves. Before taking the class inside, Peukert called off names from the roll book he carried. He looked at the students as they answered, matching faces to names. Alicia looked back steadily when he came to hers. She wasn't thinking of herself as a Jew just then, only as somebody wondering what the next year—a very long time for a fifth-grader—would be like.

“Here!” Emma said when
Herr
Peukert called her name next. Her voice held a funny catch Alicia had never heard in it before. She looked back over her shoulder. Emma was gazing at the new teacher with what could only be adoration. Alicia had never before found a recognizable thing to go with the word. Now she did.

When
Herr
Peukert finished calling the roll, he led the class into the room. The children sat down in the same alphabetical order they'd used to take their places in line. Then they rose to give the flag the Party salute and to call out, “
Heil
Buckliger!” Daily rituals accomplished, they sat down again.

Alicia didn't expect much to happen on the first day of the new school year, and she proved right.
Herr
Peukert talked a little about what he expected them to learn in the upcoming term. “Ask questions,” he urged them. “Things are changing. What we used to think we were sure of isn't always so clear any more. Some people think this is exciting. It frightens others. However you feel, though, it won't go away any time soon. You'd better get used to it.”

He passed out arithmetic books, grammar books, books of stories, and geography books to the students. Alicia filled out a white card and a blue card for each textbook, giving her name, her teacher's name, the title of the book, and the condition of the copy she had. The cards warned her that her parents would have to pay if she damaged the book.

“Question,
Herr
Peukert!” Trudi Krebs raised her hand.

“Go ahead, Trudi,” the teacher said. Alicia nodded, im
pressed in spite of herself. One way students judged teachers was by how fast they learned the names of the children in their class. Peukert was doing well.

“Sir, where are our history books?” Trudi asked.

That flabbergasted Alicia. She'd been so busy filling out cards and sneaking glances at the books she had got, she hadn't noticed one was missing. She made a face—not quite what her parents annoyed her by calling her Angry Face, but close. She didn't like missing things, not one bit.

Herr
Peukert took the question in stride. “I told you, things are changing. They're writing a new history book, but it isn't done yet, so I can't give you that one. They've decided the old one isn't so good, so I can't give you that one, either. For a while, we'll make do without one.”

How could things in history change? That flummoxed Alicia all over again. Either they'd happened or not, right? So it seemed to her. Or did the teacher mean the new history book would get rid of some lies in the old one? That would be good, if it happened. She didn't suppose she could ask him if the old book was full of lies. Too bad.

“Question,
Herr
Peukert!” That was Emma Handrick. Alicia wanted to poke a finger in her ear. Emma never asked questions. She didn't care enough about school—except when it came to avoiding the paddle—to bother with them. And then Alicia understood. Emma still didn't care about school. She cared about
Herr
Peukert.

“Go ahead,” the teacher said. He didn't remember Emma's name right away, as he had with Trudi's.

Emma must have noticed. She was noticing everything about him. But she plowed ahead anyway: “
Herr
Peukert, is the
Führer
always right?”

There was a question to make politically alert people sit up and take notice. Trudi Krebs stared at Emma. So did Wolfgang Priller, who liked the way things always had been much better than Trudi seemed to. Emma was oblivious. All she'd wanted was to make the teacher pay attention to her.

She'd done that.
Herr
Kessler would have said yes and gone about his business.
Herr
Peukert looked thoughtful. By Emma's soft sigh, that made him seem more intriguing.
Slowly, he said, “When he speaks as the head of the
Reich
or the head of the Party, he tells us which way we need to go, and we need to follow him. When he's just talking as a man…well, any man can be wrong.”

Even you?
Alicia thought.
Herr
Kessler never would have admitted anything like that, not in a million years. Alicia had always liked school; she soaked up learning the way a sponge soaked up water. But the days ahead looked a lot more interesting than the ones with
Herr
Kessler that she'd just suffered through.

When they went out for lunch, Emma sighed and looked back over her shoulder toward the classroom. “Isn't he wonderful?” she said.

“He's…not bad,” Alicia answered. The one was higher praise from her than the other was from Emma.

 

Susanna Weiss had always watched the evening news with interest. If she wanted to know what was going on in the
Reich
and the world (or what the powers that be wanted people to think was going on—not always the same thing, or even close to it), that was the place to start. Since Kurt Haldweim's death, she'd watched the news with fascination, which also wasn't the same thing.

“Good evening,” Horst Witzleben said from her televisor screen. The set from which he spoke hadn't changed. Neither had his uniform. But something about him had. Susanna had needed a while to notice it, let alone figure out what it was. Before Heinz Buckliger became
Führer,
Witzleben had talked to the people of the Greater German
Reich
. Now he talked
with
them. The difference was subtle, but she was convinced it was real.

She glanced down at the quiz she was grading. Most of her undergraduates wouldn't have recognized a subtlety if it walked up and bit them in the leg.
Would I, when I was twenty?
she wondered. Without false modesty, she thought she would have done better than they could. Of course, she was a Jew. Spotting subtleties helped keep her alive.

She scrawled
Not necessarily!
in red beside a sweeping generalization, then paused with her pen frozen a couple of centimeters above the page. How did she know none of
her students was a Jew? She didn't. All she knew was, none of them came from a family she was acquainted with. Given how secretive Jews had to be, that didn't prove a thing. There could be another little Jewish community in Berlin, parallel to hers but unaware it existed.