In the Presence of Mine Enemies (32 page)

“I don't know why Hebrew does that,” he answered un
happily. “I just know
that
it does. My father knew more about being a Jew than I do, and
his
father knew much more than he did, because his father had grown up in the days when Jews in Germany were free to be what they were. I'll teach you as much as I can, and you need to remember it so you can teach it to your children.”

“If we keep learning less and less every time, will a time come when we don't know enough?” Alicia asked.

Her father looked more unhappy still. “I don't know that, either, sweetheart. All I know is that I hope not. We have to try to pass it along, and that's what I'm doing.”

Alicia looked down at the curious set of characters she'd written. “Which letter says what? Which one says
ah
and which one says
do
and which one says
noi?
”

“It's not that simple,” her father said.

“Why not? What do you mean? This is confusing!” Alicia said.

“Because it doesn't really say
adonoi
. It says
Jahweh,
more or less—it's the word
Jehovah
comes from. But that's the name of God, and Jews aren't supposed to speak the name of God, so we say
adonoi
instead. That means
Lord
.”

“Oh.” Alicia eyed those four formidable letters once more. “This
is
confusing. Are there books where I can find out more about it?”

“Yes, there are, and you can't have any of them,” her father answered. Alicia stared at him in something close to shock. Their family loved books. The shelves in the front room and in her parents' bedroom held everything from mystery novels to books about the theater to bird-watching guides to studies of ancient Greece. But there were, she realized, no books about Jews except the Streicher children's classics in her own room. Her father went on, “You won't find those books in any Jew's house. It's not safe for us to have them. People might wonder why we do. And the last thing we want is people wondering about us. Not having those books is part of the disguise we wear. Do you see?”

“I suppose so,” Alicia said unwillingly. “But it seems a shame that we can't learn more if the books are there.”

“One of the things we could learn is what gives the Se
curity Police an excuse to arrest us,” her father said. “When you're a grownup, you can decide for yourself what you think is safe. For now, we're not going to take any chances.”

He didn't use that tone of voice very often. When he did, it meant his mind was made up and he wouldn't change it no matter what. Alicia sighed. It didn't seem fair. He usually pushed her toward learning as hard as he could. Here, he was pushing her away instead. But when he sounded like this, she would only waste her breath arguing with him.

He picked up the paper where they'd written the name of God, the name too holy to be spoken, and methodically began tearing it into little pieces. “Most of what we know, we have to pass on by word of mouth,” he said. “That's not so dangerous. It's there, and then it's gone. Paper, now, paper lasts. Paper is what gets you into trouble, because it stays there. Even if you've forgotten about it, it stays. That's what got the Kleins into trouble—a piece of paper that stayed in a file.”

“The Kleins—are Jews?” Alicia asked. Excitement flared in her when her father nodded. The more people she knew who shared this burden with her, the less heavy it seemed and the less alone she felt.

Her father said, “Because of this paper, the
Reichs
Genealogical Office thought they were, too. But nobody could prove anything, and they had to let them go. And one of the reasons nobody could prove anything is that the Kleins are careful about what they keep at home. They didn't have anything where people could point and say, ‘Ha! They have that, so they must be Jews!'”

From everything Alicia had heard, people didn't need to be sure to settle with Jews. She said as much to her father, finishing, “Why didn't they take them away and do things to them anyhow?”

That made her father frown. “I don't quite know,” he admitted. He sounded grumpy; like her, he was someone with a restless, relentless itch to find things out. “There has to be a reason. I just hope it's not a bad one.”

“What do you mean?” Alicia asked.

“Well, they could have let them go so they could help catch other Jews,” he said. Her mouth fell open. That
hadn't occurred to her. He nodded grimly. “Yes, they do things like that.”

“They may, but would the Kleins?” Alicia asked.

Her father let out a long, sad sigh. “Sweetheart, I just don't know. How can you tell what anybody will do when someone says to him, ‘Do this or else we'll kill you'? You can't know that about anyone else ahead of time. You can't even know about yourself ahead of time.”

“I would never do anything like that,” Alicia declared. Her father only sighed again.
He doesn't believe me,
she realized. She started to get angry. Then she wondered what would happen if the Security Police told her they would do something horrible to him or to her mother or to one of her sisters if she didn't do what they told her. Wouldn't she do anything to keep them from hurting people she loved? Maybe she would.

Her thought must have shown on her face, for her father reached out and tousled her hair. “You see?” he asked gently.

Alicia gave back a reluctant nod. “I guess I do.” Then a really nasty thought occurred to her, one that made her gasp with fright. “What if the Kleins
are
doing that now? What if they're helping to catch
us
?”

“It's possible,” her father admitted. All the terror Alicia had felt when she first found out she was a Jew, terror that had eased a little with the passage of time, came flooding back. But he went on, “It's possible, but I don't think it's true. If they were only pretending everything was all right last night, they could have been movie actors, they were doing such a good job. And besides, if the Security Police squeezed our names out of them, they wouldn't need to play games. They'd just break down the door in the middle of the night and take us away.”

“Ja,”
Alicia said, more than a little relieved. That was what the Security Police did, all right. Everybody knew it. Her heart stopped thumping quite so hard.

Her father laughed. “Funny, isn't it, that they're always such bastards that knowing they haven't been mean shows they really did let the Kleins go free?”

“That's just what I was thinking!” Alicia exclaimed. “How did you know?”

“Because I was thinking the same thing,” he answered, “and I'm just as happy about it as you are, believe me.” Alicia did.

 

Esther Stutzman was trying to juggle three phone calls, two mothers who needed to make return appointments, and another mother who was arguing about her bill when the door to Dr. Dambach's waiting room opened. Instantly, all the women with squalling children in the waiting room tried to shush them. The sight of a stern-faced man in a uniform did that to people, even if the dark brown outfit wasn't one most men and women in the
Reich
recognized at sight. Who wanted to take a chance?

Maximilian Ebert strode up to the receptionist's station. Ignoring mothers and children, the man from the
Reichs
Genealogical Office clicked his heels, as he had the first time he visited the pediatrician's office. “
Guten Tag, Frau
Stutzman,” he said. “I need to see Dr. Dambach right away.”

Esther wished he hadn't remembered her name. There were several reasons he might have, and she liked none of them. She took what revenge she could by answering, “I'm very sorry, but he's with a patient at the moment. If you care to sit down and wait, I'm sure it won't be too long.” By the way she said it, she might have been sure he'd wait for weeks.

But Ebert wasn't about to inconvenience himself like an ordinary person. “Please tell him I am here,” he said. “I'm sure he will see me immediately.”

“The nerve!” said a woman from behind his back. He stiffened, but did not turn.

“One moment, please,” Esther told him; the request was too reasonable for her to refuse outright. When she went back to talk to Dr. Dambach, she found him poised with a hypodermic needle above a baby's round bare bottom. She waited till he gave the shot and the baby yowled. Then she said, “Excuse me, Doctor, but
Herr
Ebert is here. He needs to see you right away, he says.”

“
Herr
Ebert?” Dambach looked blank.

“From the
Reichs
Genealogical Office,” Esther said,
wishing Ebert had never had any reason to visit the pediatrician.

“Oh. Him.” Memory jogged, Dr. Dambach nodded. “What the devil does he want now?” Esther only shrugged. Dr. Dambach muttered. Before answering her, Dambach turned to the baby's mother. “Dora may be cranky and run a small fever for a day or two. Acetaminophen syrup should relieve most of the symptoms. If she's in more distress than that—which is very unlikely—bring her back in.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I will,” the woman said.

Still muttering, Dambach gave his attention back to Esther. “I suppose I'd better see him. Bring him to my private office, and I'll be there in a few minutes. I have another patient to see first.”

“All right, Doctor.” Esther went out and delivered the word to Maximilian Ebert.

“Thank you very much,” he said, and then, once she'd taken him into the office, “Have you got a telephone number, my sweet?”

She'd thought he was unduly attentive the last time he came in. This…“What I have,
Herr
Ebert, are two children and a husband.”

He stared at her in what looked like honest bewilderment and asked, “What's that got to do with anything?”

“I'm fond of all of them, thank you very much,” she said. “And now, if you'll excuse me…” She went back out to the receptionist's station, where she announced, “Dr. Dambach has a visitor. He'll be with you as soon as he can, I promise.” She nodded to the woman who'd questioned her bill. “I'm sorry for the delay,
Frau
Mommsen. What were you saying?”

Frau
Mommsen poured out a history of her troubles, most of which had little to do with the twenty-five Reichsmarks she owed Dr. Dambach. Esther listened with half an ear. Most of her attention was on the pediatrician's private office. She hoped Dambach would tell Maximilian Ebert where to go and how to get there. She knew it was a forlorn hope, but she cherished it just the same.

Dr. Dambach didn't even get in there for another ten minutes. Esther could hear the functionary from the Ge
nealogical Office drumming his fingers on Dambach's desk. “About time,” Ebert said when the doctor finally did appear.

“You're the one who's interrupting my work,” Dambach replied, his voice chilly. “What do you want?”

Before she could find out what he wanted, someone new to the practice—a woman with a squalling toddler in her arms—came up and had to be guided through Dr. Dambach's paperwork. Because the little boy cried all through the process, Esther caught only brief snatches of conversation from the doctor's office: “…got a lot of nerve blaming me for…” “…put all of us in hot…” “…my fault, when I was only trying to…” “…but this is how it turned…”

Dr. Dambach said something else in response to that. A moment later, Maximilian Ebert stormed out of his office and out of the waiting room, fury on his face. He tried to slam the door that led to the hall, but the shock-absorbing arm at the top of the door thwarted him. The slowly closing door cut off his curses when at last it did swing shut.

“Goodness!” said the woman with the toddler. “What got under
his
skin?”

“I don't know,” Esther answered. “Whatever it is, I hope it's nothing trivial.” The woman gave her a strange look, then decided she couldn't have meant what she said and forgot about it.

But Esther had meant every word. She stayed busy till noon dealing with mothers, children, and the occasional father. When the office closed for lunch, she went back to bring Dr. Dambach a fresh cup of coffee in the hopes that he might feel like talking. “Oh, thank you,” he said around a mouthful of sandwich. “I was just going to get up and pour myself one.”

When he said no more, Esther took the bull by the horns: “Why did that Ebert fellow storm out of here as though he had a Messerschmitt on his tail?”

“Him?” Dambach gave forth with a dismissive grunt. “I think we've seen the last of him, and I can't say I'm sorry, either. What he basically told me was that I had done my job too well. I'm sorry,
Frau
Stutzman, but the only way I know how to do it is as well as I can.”