In the Presence of Mine Enemies (21 page)

“I don't know,” he said. “Lise's doing it, and she's got more sense than I do.”

“Maybe.” Erika waved her hand. “But I don't want to go to bed with Lise.”

What Heinrich wanted to say was,
Are you out of your mind?
Even if she did want to sleep with him (which struck him as strange enough when she was married to the much handsomer Willi), to say so in front of her husband and his wife? Maybe she'd known what she was doing, though, because neither Willi nor Lise leaped from a chair with a cry of fury. They were too busy quarreling over cuneiform styles and tree-ring chronology and other things about which neither of them knew a great deal.

Which left Heinrich the question of how to respond. Part of him knew exactly how he would like to respond. The rest of him told that part to shut up and forget about it. If he hadn't been happy with Lise, or maybe if he'd just been a few years younger, a few years randier, a few years stupider (assuming those last two weren't one and the same), that one part might have won the argument, especially since he got the idea he could have taken Erika right there on the card table without making either Willi or Lise notice.

But, things being as they were, yielding to temptation wasn't practical. And so he answered, “I'm sorry, but with all the racket these two are making, I didn't hear a word you said.”

Erika Dorsch's sour smile told him she didn't believe a word of it. What
did
she believe? That he didn't want to go to bed with her? Or just that he didn't want to do anything about it then and there?
Isn't that an interesting question?

Deciding he didn't want to know the answer, Heinrich reached out and waved his hand up and down between Willi and Lise. “Can we get back to bridge, please?” he asked loudly.

His wife and Erika's husband both blinked, as if they were coming back to the real world. Willi said, “I don't know why you're so impatient. We just started talking—”

“And talking, and talking,” Erika broke in, her voice acid-edged.

“It
was
fifteen minutes ago,” Heinrich said.

“Oh,
Quatsch,
” Willi said. Then he looked at his watch and blinked again. He grinned a rather sickly grin. “Oh. Well, maybe it was.” Lise seemed almost as surprised as he did.

“It's your lead, Willi, if you can think of anything besides ancient history,” Erika said.

“Let me look at the last trick, please,” Willi said, which went a long way toward proving he couldn't. He examined it, muttered to himself, and threw out a low diamond. As far as Heinrich could see, the lead might have come at random as readily as from reflection on what had gone before.

Heinrich made the contract. He and Lise went on to win the rubber, though not by nearly so much as they'd lost the first one. Shuffling for the first hand of the next rubber, Willi said, “We'll really hammer you this time.”

“Tell me a new story,” Heinrich answered. “I've heard this one before, and I don't believe a word of it.”

“You'll see.” Willi picked up his hand, arranged it in suits, and said, as casually as if he were asking the time, “Three no-trump.”

“What?” Heinrich stared. His own hand didn't have opening strength, but he hadn't imagined Willi owned that kind of powerhouse. He hadn't seen a three-no opening in at least five years. He passed. So did Erika. Willi yelped and sent her a wounded look. Visions of another slam must have danced in his head. Lise passed, too. Heinrich led. Erika laid out her hand as dummy. It was ten-high—no wonder she'd passed.

Willi didn't even make the three he'd bid. With no strength on the board, he had to play everything out of his own hand, and came up one trick short. The honors bonus for all four aces more than made up for that. Even so, he let out a sorrowful sigh. “Twenty-eight high-card points I was looking at, and down one! I'll never see another hand like that.”

The rest of the evening's bridge was less dramatic. The Gimpels and Dorsches ended up about even. As Heinrich and Lise walked to the bus stop, she asked, “What did you
and Erika talk about while Willi and I were wrangling over Babylonians?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Heinrich answered. He knew he would probably end up in trouble for not telling his wife what Erika had said. But if he did tell her, he'd end up in trouble, too.
Sometimes you can't win,
he thought, and kept walking.

A
FTER GIVING THE FLAG THE
N
ATIONAL
S
OCIALIST SALUTE
,
Herr
Kessler led Alicia Gimpel's class in singing “
Deutschland über Alles
” and the “Horst Wessel Song”: the German and Party anthems. That wasn't part of the usual morning routine, but he explained, “This is a special day, children, because the
Reich
has a new
Führer
.” His right arm shot out again. “
Heil
Buckliger!”

“
Heil
Buckliger!” Alicia and her classmates echoed dutifully. She hadn't known about the new
Führer
till breakfast this morning, when her mother and father talked about him. Aunt Käthe hadn't watched Horst Witzleben, the way her parents did. Instead, she'd played with Alicia and her sisters, and sung silly songs, and told stories that were not only funny but also a good deal sassier than the ones the Gimpel girls heard from anybody else in the family.

Herr
Kessler said, “The new
Führer
will do wonderful things for the
Reich
and for the Germanic Empire. He is very wise and very good and very strong. He must be all those things, or he never would have been chosen
Führer
.”

He sounded very sure. Almost all the pupils in the classroom nodded without a moment's hesitation. Alicia nodded, too. She was learning to be a chameleon. But she couldn't help wondering,
How does he know?

“Will things be any different now,
Herr
Kessler?” asked a boy—Alicia didn't see who.

The teacher frowned. The question was good enough that he had to answer it, but for a moment he seemed unable to find a way.
Maybe nobody told him what to say,
Alicia
thought.
He doesn't seem very good at figuring things out for himself
. At last, Kessler said, “I think things will be better. The new
Führer
is a young man—not too much older than I am—and he is active and vigorous. The old
Führer
was very old indeed. He was sickly and feeble. Some of you may have grandparents or great-grandparents who are like that.”

Several children nodded. Behind Alicia, Emma Handrick raised her hand. When
Herr
Kessler called on her, she said, “When my great-granddad got that way, my folks took him to a
Reichs
Mercy Center. Is that what they did with the old
Führer?
”

“No.
Gott im Himmel,
no!” The teacher turned very red. The question must have rocked him. Alicia couldn't remember him ever saying anything about God before. She couldn't remember any of her teachers saying anything about God. She'd always had the idea that they weren't supposed to.
Herr
Kessler needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, “Kurt Haldweim lived out his whole life. He had to, you see, because he was serving the
Reich
. Do you understand?”

“
Ja, Herr
Kessler,” Emma answered. She wasn't going to argue with him.

Alicia wanted to. Before she found out she was a Jew, she might have. She didn't dare stick out her neck now. Not being able to say what she thought sometimes made her feel as if she were choking. She wanted to cheer when a boy stuck up his hand. When the teacher pointed his way, he asked, “Excuse me,
Herr
Kessler, but if the old
Führer
was all feeble, why
didn't
they take him to a
Reichs
Mercy Center? Isn't that what you're supposed to do, before he becomes a burden?”

“The
Führer
is not a burden,” Kessler said stiffly. “The
Führer
cannot be a burden. The
Führer
is the
Führer
.”

By the way he spoke, that was supposed to settle things. Nobody in the class asked any more questions about the
Reichs
Mercy Centers, so maybe it did. Or maybe all the children realized asking more questions like that would only land them in trouble.

And maybe
Herr
Kessler realized he hadn't satisfied everybody with his answers, for he quickly changed the
subject and plunged into the day's usual lessons. No one could challenge him on those. He went back to being the classroom
Führer,
lord of all he surveyed.

For the history lesson, he rolled up the usual map of the world as it was now and rolled down a different map, one that showed the way things had been before the Second and Third World Wars. “Do you see how tiny the
Reich
was in those days, and how big our enemies were?” he said. “And yet we beat them, because we were Aryans and they were full of Jews. France, England, Russia, the United States—all full of Jews. And they fell into our hands one after another. What does this tell you? Alicia Gimpel!”

She sprang to her feet. “That Aryans are superior to Jews,
Herr
Kessler.”

“Very good. Be seated.”

She knew her lessons. She could recite them without fail. Reciting them when she didn't believe them, though, made her feel all slimy inside. She wanted to know what was true. She wanted to say what was true. She knew she would get in trouble if she did. That made going on with what she learned in school necessary. It didn't make it palatable.

Herr
Kessler asked the next question of someone else. It was also anti-Semitic. Alicia didn't like hearing it, either. She wondered how
Herr
Kessler would like listening to anti-Aryan questions all day. She suspected he would get sick of it in a hurry.

She sighed. Things had been a lot simpler before she knew what she was.

 

When Lise Gimpel was a girl, she'd grated cabbage by hand. As often as not, that had involved grating some fingertip or knuckle in with the cabbage. Her father, an engineer, had always found that funny—they weren't
his
fingertips or knuckles, after all. When she yelped, he would say, “Adds protein,” and puff on his pipe.

These days, Lise used a plastic rod to guide quartered chunks of cabbage into the maw of the food processor. The push of a button, a whir, and the job was done—not even a tenth the time, and never any need to reach for the Mer
curochrome. But every time she did it, she imagined she smelled pipe tobacco.

She bit her lip. She'd been pregnant with Francesca when the damned drunk cut short her parents' lives. Alicia had been only a toddler then. She didn't remember her grandparents, and they'd never got to know their other grandchildren. Sometimes life seemed dreadfully unfair.

Lise laughed, not that it was funny.
As if a Jew in the Third
Reich
should look for fairness
. But somehow God seemed extra malicious in piling a personal disaster on top of the one she'd been born with.

Alicia came into the kitchen. She liked to help cook. So did Roxane. Francesca didn't care one way or the other. Lise was glad to see her daughter. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said. “How did it go today?” Talking with Alicia would help ease her out of her gloom.

So she thought, anyway, till Alicia blurted, “Mommy, do I have to be a Jew? I don't think I want to.”

Before Lise answered, she automatically looked around. “Where are your sisters?”

“Upstairs doing homework. I finished mine.”

“All right. Good. You have to be careful even saying that word.” Lise put her hands on Alicia's shoulders. “Now—why don't you? What happened today that made you think you don't?”

“It's not just today,” Alicia answered. “It's everything that's happened since I found out. People just keep saying mean things—horrible things—about Jews—and everybody
believes
them. It's like they're calling
me
names all the time.”

“Oh, my dear.” Lise gave Alicia a squeeze. Her daughter's head already came up past her shoulder. “I remember that, and I remember how much it hurt, too. They don't know any better, that's all.”

“But if I weren't a Jew, then it wouldn't matter any more.” Alicia could be as painfully logical as her father, though at ten she didn't always see as far as she needed to.

Lise cocked her head to one side to make sure she didn't hear one of Alicia's sisters charging downstairs at the worst possible moment. Even after she'd satisfied herself that
they were busy, she needed a few seconds to marshal her thoughts. “If you decide that's what you end up wanting, pumpkin, you can do it. You can always pretend what we told you isn't real. We said so, remember?”

Alicia nodded. “I want to do that.”

“You can. But I have to tell you, it may not be quite so simple. If you beat eggs together to scramble them, can you separate the whites out again afterwards to make meringue?”

“Of course not,” Alicia said.

“Well, you can always live as though you're not a Jew, pretend you're not a Jew,” Lise said. “But you'll know even so. You'll have to know. You can't very well forget, can you?”

“I can try.” Alicia screwed up her face. Lise could tell she was doing her best to pretend that that evening with the Stutzmans and Susanna had never happened. Lise could also tell, by her daughter's despairing expression, that she was having no more luck than anyone else would have. Alicia pointed an accusing finger at her. “You and Daddy didn't tell me anything about that.”

“No, we didn't,” Lise admitted. “We thought it would be pretty obvious—and we didn't know you wouldn't want to be a Jew.”

“I haven't got much choice, have I?” Alicia asked bleakly.

“You have a choice in the way you live.” Lise picked her words with great care. “You haven't got a choice about what you
are,
not any more. When you have children, you'll have a choice about telling them what they are.”

“Why would I ever want to put anybody else through this?” Alicia said.

Were there any Jews left in the
Reich
who hadn't asked themselves that question at least once? Were there any who hadn't asked it a thousand times? Quietly, Lise answered, “Because if you don't, then the Nazis win. They say we don't deserve to live, we don't deserve to be here at all. And if you don't tell your children what they are, who they are, aren't you saying you think the Nazis were right all along?”

“Weren't they?” Pain filled Alicia's voice. “If they thought Jews were horrible, if
everybody
thought Jews were horrible, if nobody tried to stop the SS from doing what it did, maybe Jews—maybe
we
really were horrible. Maybe we
deserved
what happened.”

That was another thought that had probably crossed every surviving Jew's mind. People saw themselves, at least in part, in the mirror their neighbors held up to them. If the mirror showed a twisted image, wouldn't they start to believe that was the way they really seemed? How could they help it?

“Some people did try to stop the SS. Not enough, though, and most of them got killed. But I don't think anybody deserves to be killed for what he is,” Lise said. “You can't help that. If you
do
something bad enough, maybe you deserve to die. That's a whole different argument, though. For just trying to live, and to get along as best you can?” She shook her head. “No, sweetheart.”

Her daughter looked haunted. That was fair enough, too. How many millions of ghosts crowded the Germanic Empire? Better, maybe, not to try to count them all. That way lay despair. Alicia said, “I sure hope you're right.”

So do I,
Lise thought.
But how can I know? How can anybody know?
One thing she did know was that she had to conceal her doubts from her daughter. She said, “Of course I am.”

“What am I going to do?” Alicia said, more to herself than to Lise.

But Lise answered her, with forced briskness: “What are you going to do? Since you've finished your homework and your sisters haven't, you're going to take a bath. And make sure you rinse all the shampoo out of your hair and wash behind your ears. Sometimes you leave enough dirt to grow potatoes in.”

“Potatoes.” Alicia thought that was funny. She was a child; she couldn't stay gloomy for long. She went up the stairs singing, “I'm my own vegetable garden.”

Lise envied her that ability to swing away from sadness so fast.
I used to be able to do that,
she thought.
I wonder where it went
. Wherever it went, it was gone for good now.
She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She hardly ever drank when she wasn't with other people who were drinking, but today she made an exception.