In the Presence of Mine Enemies (55 page)

Twenty minutes later, the telephone rang. She picked it up. “
Bitte?
This is Susanna Weiss.”

“
Fräulein Doktor
Professor, this is Rosa.” Professor Oppenhoff's secretary paused for a moment, then said, “The department chairman strongly advises against watching the
Führer
's speech from your window.”

“He does?” Susanna said indignantly. “Why?”

“Because the SS has told him they may shoot anyone they see appearing in a window. Whoever it is might be an assassin, they say.”

“Oh.” Now it was Susanna's turn to pause. “Well, I hope you get hold of everybody. Otherwise, we'll need to fill some vacancies next semester.”

“I'll do my best,” the secretary said, and hung up. Considering how badly they got along, Susanna knew a certain amount of relief that Rosa had called her. The other woman didn't seem to want to see her dead, anyhow. That was something.

Then she started to laugh. “God help anyone who's in the men's room when the phone rings!” she exclaimed.

Even if watching Buckliger's speech turned out not to be
such a good idea, she could still listen to it. She opened her window a few centimeters so she could hear better. The
Führer
wasn't there yet, so none of the SS snipers took a shot at her.

Noise from down below swelled as the crowd built up. You could put a lot of people between the two main wings of the university buildings. From the excited buzz that rose, she knew to the minute when Heinz Buckliger came into sight.

“
Guten Tag,
students, faculty, and friends,” Buckliger said. His amplified voice sounded a little tinny. Technicians would probably improve it for the radio and televisor. “I am glad to come to this great center of learning. Knowledge is at the heart of the
Reich
's progress in war and peace. Without our talented scientists and engineers, we could not have won our great victories. Nor would the peace that followed have been so prosperous, so healthy, or so enjoyable.”

He got a hand. Susanna might have known he would. She wouldn't have cheered that, not in a million years. Buckliger proved he was a German after all. The
Volk
might live prosperous, healthy, enjoyable lives. What about the Jews? The gypsies? Homosexuals? Poles? Russians? Ukrainians? Serbs? Arabs? Negroes? Feebleminded people? Did he think of them at all? Or only of his own comfort? From what he said, the answer seemed all too obvious.

“We need to know ourselves as well,” the
Führer
said, after showing he didn't know himself so well even if he could sound like Marcus Aurelius. Would a Roman Emperor count as an Aryan? Probably not, not when he'd been fighting Germans along the Danube while he wrote the
Meditations
. Buckliger continued, “And the best way to know ourselves is to tell ourselves the truth.

“We cannot do that while the
Reichstag
is only a rubber stamp. It has been nothing more for much too long. As Hitler pointed out in the first edition of
Mein Kampf,
democratic elections are the best way to find representatives who will serve the people who chose them and not themselves alone.” He paused for applause, and got it.

“This being so,” he went on, “I am calling new elections to the
Reichstag,
voting to take place on Sunday, July 10. All seats are to be contested. Candidates need not be members of the Party, so long as they are of Aryan blood and good character. Ballots will be secret. There will be no penalty for voting one's conscience. I have not the slightest particle of doubt that the best will prevail. And the
Volk
and the
Reich
will be better for it.”

The ovation this time was hesitant, as if the
Führer
's audience was not sure whether it was allowed to cheer. That didn't surprise Susanna. What Heinz Buckliger had said did. But it was hardly surprising to be surprised in Berlin these days. That speech of Rolf Stolle's in the Adolf Hitler Platz where the crowd drove off the SS band…The SS had gone away, and not only did no one get arrested, the story made the evening news. Heinrich had been there. Up till today, Susanna had been sick with envy. Now she too had a moment of history to claim as her own.

“We National Socialists have ruled Germany wisely and well for many years,” Buckliger said. “I have faith that the
Volk
will recognize our service and give us the large majority in the
Reichstag
we deserve.”

Loud, confident applause rang out. Of course people knew they were safe clapping after the
Führer
praised the Nazis. Susanna thought Buckliger was probably right about the Party's winning most of the seats in the
Reichstag
. Even now, how many non-Nazis would be bold enough to run against Party
Bonzen?
How many who did run would win? Maybe some. Many? It seemed unlikely.

Did Buckliger really believe the Nazis had ruled Germany well and wisely? They'd won, thanks in no small measure to Hitler's demonic energy and Himmler's grim ruthlessness. But the blood of the people they'd murdered—the blood of the peoples they'd murdered—still cried out from the grave…and from the crematorium for those millions who'd never got a grave.

“I know reform, revitalization, cannot come overnight,” the
Führer
said. “The
Reich
is large and complex. Those who call for everything to be perfect by tomorrow are
naive. But those who say nothing needs repair are willfully blind. Change is part of life. It is here. It will go forward. And it will succeed.”

He got another big hand. Susanna was intrigued by his methods. In back-to-back sentences, he'd skewered Rolf Stolle and Lothar Prützmann. No doubt he meant to show himself as a moderate, as a man embarked on the only possible course. That could work. But she remembered the thought she'd had not so long before. A moderate was also somebody vulnerable from both the left and the right. Did Heinz Buckliger see that?

Most people would say,
What do you think you're doing, trying to guess along with the
Führer
?
Susanna cared very little about what most people said. If she had, she would have dropped her Judaism like a grenade with the fuse lit.

Besides, up till the time when Buckliger became
Führer,
politics in the
Reich
had been not only appalling but, worse yet, bloody dull. Some of the things that went on were still appalling. But only someone who was deaf and blind would have called them dull. And when things were interesting, how could you
not
try to guess what would happen next?

Outside, the applause went on and on, though the
Führer
didn't say anything more. Susanna concluded he was leaving the platform, leaving the university. Pretty soon, the coast would be clear. She could look out her window again without worrying about trigger-happy SS sharpshooters.

In the meantime…In the meantime, she still had her essays to grade. They would have been there even if Kurt Haldweim were still
Führer
. In a lot of ways, life went on in spite of politics.

And, in a lot of ways, it didn't. How many lives had the politics of the
Reich
snuffed out? Too many. Millions and millions too many. What did undergraduate essays matter, with that in the back of her mind?

But her life had to go on, no matter what the
Reich
had done. Shaking her head, she picked up a red pen and got back to work.

 

A day like any other day. That was how Heinrich Gimpel remembered it afterwards. It could have been any Tuesday. The kids were running around getting ready for school. Francesca was still grumbling about some new idiotic project
Frau
Koch had inflicted on the class. Roxane was spelling words out loud; she was going to have a test. And Alicia had her nose in a book. Lise had to yell at her to get her to put it down and do the things she needed to do. Yes, everything seemed normal as could be.

Blackbirds on lawns tugged at worms as Heinrich walked up the street toward the bus stop. The sun shone brightly. Spring was really here now. He couldn't recall any other spring that had seemed so hopeful, so cheerful. Was that Mother Nature's fault or Heinz Buckliger's? Heinrich didn't know. He didn't much care, either. He would enjoy the moment for as long as it lasted.

He waited at the bus stop for a few minutes, then got on the bus for the Stahnsdorf train station. Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He sat down next to Heinrich.
“Guten Morgen,”
he said.

“Same to you,” Heinrich answered.
“Wie geht's?”

“It's been better,” Willi said. “I have to tell you, though, it's been worse, too. Erika's been…kind of cheerful lately.” He looked this way and that, a comic show of suspicion. “I wonder what she's up to.”

“Heh,” Heinrich said uneasily. As far as he could tell, Erika had never said anything to Willi about what had happened at her sister's house on Burggrafen-Strasse—or about any of the several things that might have happened there but hadn't. He supposed he should have been grateful. He
was
grateful. But he was also suspicious, and his suspicion had no comic edge to it.

When the bus got to the Stahnsdorf station, he and Willi bought their copies of the
Völkischer Beobachter
and carried them out to the platform. They climbed aboard the train up to Berlin, sat down together, and started reading the morning news. Almost as if they'd rehearsed it, they simultaneously pointed to the same story below the fold on the front page.

STOLLE ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY
, the headline said. There
was a small head shot of the
Gauleiter
of Berlin just below the line of big black type. The story, as bald as any Heinrich had ever seen in the
Beobachter,
announced that Rolf Stolle was indeed running for the
Reichstag
.

“Can he do that?” Heinrich said, and then, “How can he do that? He's already
Gauleiter
.” The puzzle offended his sense of order.

But Willi had the answer: “
Gauleiter
's a Party office.
Reichstag
member would be a state office. He could hold both at once.”

“You're right,” Heinrich said wonderingly. The National Socialist Party and the
Reich
were as closely intertwined as a pair of lovers—or as a tree and a strangler fig. But they weren't quite one and the same.

“I wonder how the
Führer
will like that,” Willi said.

“Stolle trying for a national forum?”

Willi nodded. “
Ja
. And Stolle trying for votes in general.” He lowered his voice. “I mean, who ever voted for Buckliger for anything? Party
Bonzen
and
Wehrmacht
bigwigs, sure, but nobody else.”

“You're right.” Again, wonder filled Heinrich's voice. Till Buckliger's speech at Friedrich Wilhelm University, that wouldn't have mattered. Who'd voted—really voted—for anyone who mattered in the
Reich
? No one. Elections had been afterthoughts, farces. This one felt different. Stolle must have sensed it, too. He might well have been a clown. Several of the moves he'd made lately convinced Heinrich he was anything but a fool.

And Willi, when it came to politics if not to women, was also anything but a fool. “I wonder
why
the
Führer
's not running for a seat in the
Reichstag,
” he said thoughtfully.

That was an interesting question, too. Heinrich said, “Maybe he's worried he'd lose.”

“Maybe,” Willi said. “It's the only thing I thought of that made any sense at all, too. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you know what I mean. He can find a district full of Prussian cabbage farmers or Bavarian beer brewers that would elect him no matter what.”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you?” Heinrich agreed. The more they talked about it, the more normal their tone be
came. The more freedom all the people of the
Reich
got, the more they seemed to take it for granted. The more they got, the more they craved? Was that true, too? Could that be true? Maybe it could. Maybe it really could. But who would have believed it a year before?

Willi suddenly looked sly. “The other side of the coin is what happens if Buckliger doesn't run for the
Reichstag
. If he doesn't, he's still
Führer
. He's still got all the
Führer
's powers. He can tell it what to do.”