In the Presence of Mine Enemies (14 page)

Police cars raced up, sirens screeching. The men inside them wore pig-snouted gas masks. They shot tear-gas canisters into the riot. Where nothing else had worked, that did. Fascists for and against the first edition fled.

So did Susanna, not quite soon enough. Her eyes were streaming and her stomach twisting with nausea when she made it back into the lobby of the Silver Eagle. The academics in there were fleeing, too, for fresh wisps of gas came in every time the doors opened.

Susanna repaired to the bar, which seemed a popular port in the storm. Of course, the bar was a popular port in the storm at every academic conference she'd ever attended. She took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. It didn't help much. The single-malt Scotch she ordered didn't help her eyes much, either, but it made the rest of her feel better.

“Dear God in heaven,” said a British professor who also staggered in weeping like a fountain, “what
is
going on out there?”

Susanna eyed him—blurrily. “Literary criticism,” she said.

 

“
Achtung!
Form your lines!”
Herr
Kessler shouted as the schoolchildren got off the bus to one side of the Great Hall. He sounded more like a
Wehrmacht
drill sergeant than a teacher—but then, that was true a lot of the time. “Take your partner's hand! Hold your flag in your free hand! Now—forward to the end of the queue!”

Alicia Gimpel took Emma Handrick's hand. The alphabet made them line partners, as it made them sit close together. Alicia wished she were paired with someone else. Emma had cold, sweaty palms. Nothing Alicia could do about it. She imagined complaining to
Herr
Kessler. Imagining the paddling she would get for trying it immediately squelched the idea.

The swastika flag she held in her left hand was bordered in black, a token of mourning for the departed
Führer
. Kurt Haldweim lay in state under the monstrous dome of the Great Hall. Along with other children from all over Berlin—from all over Germany—Alicia and her school-mates would file past his body and then line the parade route as his funeral procession went past.

“This way!”
Herr
Kessler shouted.

“No—over here,” a uniformed attendant said, pointing in the opposite direction. “Your group is to take its place behind those bigger children.” Fuming, his face beet red, the teacher led them to the right place.

“He doesn't know everything,” Emma whispered, and smiled maliciously. For that, Alicia forgave her her sweaty palm.

The line moved forward with what the world had learned to call Germanic efficiency. Not even
Herr
Kessler could find anything to complain about there. Within twenty minutes, Alicia and her classmates had entered the Great Hall. The space under that unbelievable dome seemed even vaster within than without. The interior appointments had a simple grandeur to them. A recess clad in gold mosaic opposite the entrance broke a circle of a hundred marble columns, each twenty-five meters tall. In front of the recess, on a marble pedestal fourteen meters high, stood a German eagle with a swastika in its claws. And in front of the pedestal lay the mortal remains of Kurt Haldweim.

Floral decorations and shrubbery surrounded the casket of gilded bronze in which the
Führer
lay in state. SS guards stood on either side of the coffin, displaying the many decorations Haldweim had won in his long, illustrious career as a soldier and National Socialists administrator. Yet try as they would, the wizards of ceremony who had staged this scene could not overcome one basic difficulty: the Great Hall altogether dwarfed the pale, still remains of the hawk-faced man who had ruled the Germanic Empire for a quarter of a century.

Haldweim had been
Führer
far longer than Alicia had been alive; to her, then, he was as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. But the Pyramids remained, and now he was gone. If anything, his last surroundings stressed how transitory any mere man was. To make any sort of show at all, he would have had to be the size of a
Brachiosaurus
. Alicia had always imagined the
Führer
as being more than a man, but here she saw at first hand it wasn't so.

Young mourners went by in a steady stream, almost close enough to touch the nearest wreaths. With a ten-year-old's instinctive love of horror, Alicia wondered what would happen if anybody did. She supposed one of those SS men—each as still now as if himself carved from stone—would suddenly spring to life and shoot the miscreant. Or maybe even that wouldn't be enough. Maybe they would drag him away to SS headquarters and take their time disposing of him.

Then she was past the display, past the coffin, past the wizened corpse inside, and walking quickly towards a door of simply human proportions that led out to Adolf Hitler Platz. The square was already filling with people either in uniform—military, Party, and SS—or in civilian mourning attire. “We won't be able to see,” Emma whispered in dismay.

“Yes, we will,” Alicia whispered back. “They wouldn't bring us all the way here and then hide us. Besides, they'll want people to see we're here.” Televisor cameras on platforms stood out from the throng like islands in the sea. More cameras on the Great Hall, on the
Führer
's palace to the left, and on the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
building across the street gave broader views. The building where Alicia's father worked seemed like an old friend.

She proved right, too, which always made her feel good. Officials in particularly fancy uniforms shepherded the schoolchildren into reserved spaces right next to the route of the funeral procession, which was marked off by red-and-black tape imprinted with swastikas. There the officials arranged them roughly in order of height, shortest in front, so they could all be seen to best advantage.

“Told you so,” Alicia whispered. Emma stuck out her tongue.
Herr
Kessler coughed and glared. Emma turned pale. He wouldn't whack her in public, not on this somber occasion, but he wouldn't forget, either. When the bus took them back to Stahnsdorf…

“I have to go to the bathroom!” exclaimed a little redheaded boy who couldn't have been much older than Roxane. One of the officials took him by the hand, led him to a portable toilet, and then brought him back. Alicia giggled—but first she made sure
Herr
Kessler was looking the other way.

Buses and commuter trains brought more and more mourners into the Adolf Hitler Platz, until the entire immense square was full. Most of the people there wouldn't be able to see much, although the televisor screen mounted on the front of the
Führer
's palace showed them what they were missing. A lot of them had doubtless been ordered to come, as Alicia had, but what about the others? Did they want to be a part of history, if only a tiny part?

Alicia looked down at the German flag with the mourning border in her hand. Suddenly she wondered why
she
was supposed to be sorry Kurt Haldweim had died. He'd been
Führer
of the Germanic Empire, yes. If she'd been all German, that would have made reason enough. A few weeks earlier, she would have thought it did. Now…Now she knew what the Germans had done to
her
folk.

She still felt like a German. She also felt like a Jew—and wouldn't a Jew be glad, not sorry, the German
Führer
was dead? Not for the first time lately, she felt very confused.

Funereal music poured from speakers mounted at the edge of the square. “Everyone keep quiet and look sad,”
Herr
Kessler hissed.

Next to Alicia, Emma had a good reason for frowning. She just needed to think about what would happen to her when she got back to school. Alicia had to work hard to make the corners of her mouth turn down. She finally managed it the way she had in the game with her sisters: by pretending she was in a play and had to act a part.

Pallbearers wearing Army field-gray,
Luftwaffe
light blue, Navy dark blue, SS black, and National Socialist brown bore Kurt Haldweim's coffin out of the Great Hall and set it on a wheeled bier drawn by eight black horses that had pulled up in front of the entrance. Every one of the men was blond and handsome and close to two meters tall—and every one of them was made to seem taller still by a high-crowned cap. The pallbearers looked magnificent in closeup shots on the televisor screen at the front of the
Führer
's palace. Seen live, they might have been ants in front of the inhuman, overwhelming immensity of the Great Hall.

The bier set out across the Adolf Hitler Platz towards Alicia at a slow walk. It was draped in black velvet, against which the red in the German national flag stood out like blood. The pallbearers goose-stepped behind the bier. Their somber faces might have been stamped from the same mold.

Behind them came visiting heads of state, some in uniform, others wearing dark civilian garb. German military and Party functionaries followed, all in their distinctive
costumes. Next came foreign ambassadors, and after them elite units from the military and
Waffen
-SS, from the National Socialist Party hierarchy, and from the
Hitler Jugend
.

When the bier was almost directly in front of Alicia, one of the horses did what horses do. Half the sorrowful schoolchildren suddenly snorted and squealed. Half the teachers hastily hissed in horror. The goose-stepping pallbearers couldn't alter their paces, not without looking bad. One of them stepped in it. He marched on past, his expression unchanged no matter what clung to the sole of his gleaming boot.

Most of the heads of states and other dignitaries evaded the unfortunate substance. By the time the soldiers and fliers and sailors and SS men and brownshirts and Hitler Youths had gone by, though, it was quite thoroughly trodden into the concrete of the square.

By then, the teachers had stopped hissing. Once Haldweim's coffin had passed, the cameras turned away from the schoolchildren. They'd served their purpose.
Herr
Kessler and another teacher started talking in low voices. “I wonder when we'll have a new
Führer,
” the other man said.

“I hope it's soon,” Alicia's teacher answered. “It wasn't like this when Himmler died. I remember that. Back then, everybody knew we'd stay on a steady course. Nowadays?” He shook his head. Disapproval radiated from him.

“They'll make a good choice, whoever it finally is,” the other teacher said.

Herr
Kessler seemed to realize he might have gone too far. “Oh, I'm sure they will,” he said quickly. You never could tell who might be listening. Alicia had learned that long before she found out she was a Jew.

I could report him,
she thought. The news always ran stories about heroic children who turned in evildoers they'd discovered—sometimes even their own parents. Getting rid of her bad-tempered teacher was tempting, too.

But the idea died before it was fully formed, for Alicia's next thought was,
If I denounce him, they'll probably investigate me, too
. She shook her head in horror of her own. How did the handful of Jews at the heart of the Germanic
Empire survive? By never drawing any special notice to themselves. Perhaps someone else would report
Herr
Kessler, but she wouldn't. She couldn't. She didn't dare.

The last unit of brownshirts left the Adolf Hitler Platz. It began to empty, and did so almost as quickly and efficiently as it had filled. People streamed away to the buses and trains that had brought them to the square. The lines were long, but they were orderly, and they moved fast. There was next to no pushing and shoving and shouting, as Alicia's schoolbooks said there was in less enlightened parts of the world.

Again, she wondered,
Are my books telling the truth?
If they lied about Jews—and she had to believe they did—what else did they lie about? Had there ever been a Roman Emperor named Augustus? Was Mt. Everest really the tallest mountain in the world? Had Horst Wessel been a hero and a martyr? Were two and two truly four?

She muttered in annoyance. She'd checked her arithmetic lessons before, and they held good. But how could she test what the books said about Mt. Everest, which was far away and hard to get to, or about Horst Wessel and Augustus, who'd lived in the altogether irretrievable past? She saw no simple way.

Maybe Daddy knows,
she thought as she scrambled aboard her school bus. Her father knew all sorts of strange things, many of them useless but most of them interesting or entertaining. If he didn't know these, she couldn't think of anyone who would.

Herr
Kessler got on the bus. He counted the students to make sure nobody had been left behind, then grunted in satisfaction. “Everyone present and accounted for,” he told the driver before returning his attention to the class. “Out of respect for the memory of our beloved
Führer,
you will be silent—completely silent—on the return journey to Stahnsdorf. If you are not silent, you will be very, very sorry. Do you understand me?” He sounded as if he looked forward to making someone, or several someones, very, very sorry.