In the Presence of Mine Enemies (75 page)

Alicia nudged her sister. “Tell her.”

Francesca did. Trudi's eyes widened. “Really?” she whispered. Francesca crossed her heart.
I don't think Jews are supposed to do that
, went through Alicia's mind.
She
hadn't done it since she found out what she was. Then she stopped worrying about it. Trudi put one arm around her and the other around Francesca and started dancing both of them around in a circle, whooping while she danced.

“What's going on?” another girl called. Trudi and Francesca both shouted out the news. The other girl jumped straight up in the air. Then she ran over and started dancing, too. More girls heard the news, too, and joined the circle. It got bigger and bigger, spinning dizzily around the playground. A few boys even danced with them, mostly ones who'd had the Beast and knew what Francesca's class was escaping.

“Was ist hier los?”
A man's voice—a teacher's voice—stopped the exuberance in its tracks where nothing else would have. “Alicia Gimpel, tell me at once.”

“
Jawohl, Herr
Peukert.” All panting and sweaty, Alicia paused. “It's nothing,
Herr
Peukert. We're just…happy,
Herr
Peukert.”

Would he ask why they were happy? Would their being loud and disorderly count for more? It would have with a lot of teachers.
Herr
Peukert kept right on looking stern. But then, slowly and thoughtfully, he nodded. “Happy is not a bad thing for children to be. You may continue.” He turned his back on the circle. He didn't turn around when the dancing started again.

“He knows why,” Francesca whispered to Alicia. “He knows, but he doesn't care.” Wonder filled her face.

“Nobody cares about what happened to the Beast.” Alicia corrected herself: “Except that she's gone, I mean.” She couldn't think of a better reason to dance.

When lunch ended and students went into their classrooms again, hers buzzed with the news. Nobody could hold still. Nobody could keep quiet. A lot of Alicia's classmates had suffered through a year with
Frau
Koch. Some of the ones who hadn't had a brother or sister who had, the way Alicia did. And all the boys and girls knew what the Beast was like.

Herr
Peukert put up with it longer than Alicia thought he would. At last, though, he said, “Enough. If you want to dance at lunch or after school, that's your business. When you're here, though, we have work to do. You may not care about it now, but some of it will be important later on. Kindly buckle down and pay attention.”

And they did, or most of them did. The bargain seemed fair to Alicia. The boys and girls—mostly boys—who kept on being noisy were the ones who were always noisy in class.
Herr
Peukert had a lot more patience than
Herr
Kessler had, but he didn't own an infinite supply. He gave the loudest, most obnoxious boy a swat. The whack of paddle on backside did an amazing job of calming the others down.

Nobody on the bus going home told the children to be quiet. They giggled and squealed and sang songs, most of them about the things a Beast did in the woods. They would have danced in the aisle, but that was too much for the long-suffering bus driver. “You got to stay in your seats,” he shouted over the din in the bus. “You got to. Them's the rules, by God.”

The children did sit down. Maybe that was simply fear about what would happen to them if they didn't, but maybe it was something more, too. In the
Reich
, few arguments carried more weight than
them's the rules
. The rules and good order went hand in hand, and German children learned to obey along with their other lessons.

But we wouldn't obey Lothar Prützmann, even if the Beast thought we ought to,
Alicia thought. Then something else crossed her mind—
what do you mean, we?
She couldn't automatically think of herself as a German any more. That was what being a Jew did to her: it made her an outsider in her own country.

Part of her still wished for the feeling of belonging she'd had before she found out what she was. But, considering a lot of the things Germans had done, maybe being on the outside looking in was the better part of the bargain.

 

Had Lise Gimpel expected miracles from the new
Reichstag
, she would have been disappointed. Since she expected
very little, she found herself pleasantly surprised every now and again. The delegates chose Rolf Stolle as their Speaker. The
Gauleiter
used his new bully pulpit to go right on slanging Heinz Buckliger for not doing enough, and for not doing it fast enough. That didn't surprise Lise at all.

Laws cutting back the powers of the SS did. So did the public hangings of a couple of Lothar Prützmann's chief henchmen. The dangling bodies—shown on the evening news—declared the new laws had teeth. The lesson was unsubtle and thoroughly Nazi, but no less effective for that.

Holland held elections, too, and chose a parliament with a non-Fascist majority. Panzers didn't roll. The German Foreign Ministry said not a word. Dutchmen didn't dance in the streets. They didn't seem to want to give the
Reich
any excuse to change its mind. Lise couldn't blame them.

As summer gave way to fall, Heinrich said the Americans were getting friskier than ever. “What will they do?” Lise asked him. “Will they try to rebel?”

“I don't think so. I hope not,” her husband answered. “That would be just what…some people needed.” He still spoke carefully. The house might be bugged.

“How hard would the government…the way it is now…try to stop them?”

“I don't know that, either,” Heinrich said. “But if the government…the way it is now…didn't try to stop them, I don't think it would be the government for very long.”

“But they really have put a boot on the SS's neck,” Lise protested.

“I wasn't talking about the SS. I was talking about the
Wehrmacht,
” Heinrich said. “The Army won't put up with weakness here, and it won't want to let the Yankees get too strong. They aren't like the Dutch or the Czechs. They could be rivals. They could be worse rivals than the Empire of Japan, because they're more like us. The
Wehrmacht
wouldn't like that at all, and how can you blame it?”

Lise eyed her husband before answering. He'd tacked on the last half dozen words, she judged, to keep anyone on the other end of a bug happy. “Who possibly could?” she
said in the same spirit. “After it broke up the
Putsch
, who could blame it for anything?”

Heinrich started to nod, then caught himself and wagged a finger at her, as if to say,
Naughty, naughty
. Lise stuck out her tongue. Maybe she'd meant you couldn't blame the
Wehrmacht
for anything because it hadn't done anything blameworthy. Or maybe she'd meant you didn't dare blame it for anything, because it was the greatest power in the land. Which? Her green eyes dancing, she shook her head. She was a woman. She was entitled to her mysteries. And she wasn't altogether sure herself.

“What about the Czechs?” she asked, changing the subject a little. “Will the
Reich
let them go?”

Her husband shrugged. “Beats me. They have the vote last summer to back up their declaration of independence. And if anybody can outfinagle the Foreign Ministry, it's the fellow they've got leading Unity. He can make you feel ashamed when you do something that isn't on the up-and-up, and how many people are able to do that? But…”

“Yes. But.” Lise knew why Heinrich hesitated. The Czechs were Slavs, and Slavs, even Slavs like the Czechs who'd been entangled in German affairs since time out of mind, were in the National Socialist way of thinking
Untermenschen
. If you once started making concessions to
Untermenschen
, didn't you acknowledge they might not be so inferior after all? And if you acknowledged that, how did you justify the massacres and the slave labor that had filled the last seventy years?

Even more to the point, if you acknowledged that Slavs—or some Slavs—might not be
Untermenschen
, didn't you take a step towards acknowledging that Jews also might not be
Untermenschen
?
Could
a National Socialist government take a step in that direction?

“The
Führer
has said mistakes were made in years gone by,” Heinrich said; if the
Führer
said it, it couldn't possibly be treasonous—as long as he stayed
Führer
. “If we decide to set some of those mistakes to rights, that wouldn't be so bad.”

“No. Of course it wouldn't,” Lise answered. Even though the Czechs were doing most of the agitating these days,
they'd got off relatively easy. How could the
Reich
make amends to the relative handful of Poles and Russians and Ukrainians who still survived?

And, for that matter, how could the
Reich
make amends to the handful of Jews who, in spite of everything, still survived? Lise knew an impossibility when she saw one. Come to that, she didn't want a parade of blackshirts and Party
Bonzen
clicking their heels and apologizing to her. That sort of spectacle might appeal to Susanna, but then Susanna reveled in opera. All Lise wanted was to be left alone, to get on with her life regardless of what she happened to be.

“We're asking questions we couldn't even have imagined a couple of years ago,” Heinrich said. “Next to the questions, the answers don't seem quite so important.”

“Says who?” Lise inquired sarcastically. “If the Security Police had come up with a different answer to their question a few months ago, you wouldn't be here trying to come up with answers to yours.”
And the girls wouldn't be here, either,
she thought,
and it wouldn't matter whether I was here or not because I'd be dead inside
.

After a brief pause, her husband nodded. “Well, you're right,” he said. One of the reasons they'd stayed pretty happily married the past fifteen years was that they were both able to say that when they needed to.

“Politics!” Lise turned the word into a curse. “I wish politics never had anything to do with us. I wish we could just go on about our business.”

“Part of our business is making the
Reich
better. That's part of everybody's business right now, I think,” Heinrich said. “If we don't make it better, what'll happen? We saw before the election—other people will make it worse, that's what.”

Lise wanted to quarrel with him. But she remembered too well the horror that had coursed through her when Lothar Prützmann's tame announcer started going on about the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German
Reich
. And, remembering, she too said those three little words almost as important as
I love you:
“Well, you're right.”

 

Heinrich, Lise, and the girls closed their umbrellas when they came up onto the Stutzmans' front porch. The walk from the bus stop had been wet, but not too wet. Winter was thinking about making way for spring. It hadn't got around to doing it yet; still, the worst of the nasty weather was probably past. Heinrich dared hope so, anyway.

All three Gimpel girls raced for the doorbell. Francesca rang it a split second before Alicia or Roxane could. Heinrich and Lise smiled over the girls' heads. They would do that at elevators, too, which made their parents require that they take turns pressing those buttons.
Anyone would think they're children or something
, went through Heinrich's mind. He smiled again.

Esther Stutzman opened the door. “Come in! Come in! Welcome! Welcome!” she said, and stood aside. Delicious odors wafted out of the doorway: cooking meat, new-baked bread, and something else, something spicy, Heinrich couldn't quite place.

“Oh, good—you've got a mat out,” Lise said. “We don't want to drip all over your front hall.” She wagged a warning finger at the girls. “Don't you go running all over till you get out of your raincoats, do you hear me?” The warning came just in time. Alicia was trembling with eagerness to charge up to Anna's room.

“Is Susanna here?” Heinrich asked.

“She got here twenty minutes ago,” Esther answered. Now she and Heinrich were the ones who smiled. Susanna always showed up early. Esther turned to Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. “Why don't we hang those coats on the bar for the shower curtain in the downstairs bathroom here? That way, they won't get anything else wet.” Heinrich and Lise followed so they could hang their coats in the bathroom, too.

Lise asked, “Did Gottlieb get leave from the
Hitler Jugend
?”