In the Presence of Mine Enemies (41 page)

Slowly, she said, “There are times when you're too damned modest for your own good, too.”

She's angry at
me
now,
he realized in astonished dismay.
What the devil did I do?
“I told you the truth,” he said.

“No, I'll tell you the truth,” Erika said. “The truth is, the
Führer
came to see you. You, not anybody else. The truth is, that's important. It could make you important. And the truth is, you don't seem to want to do anything about it or even admit it.”

She might have been a wife giving a husband a pep talk. She
was
a wife giving a husband a pep talk. The only trouble was, she wasn't Heinrich's wife, and she didn't know him as well as she thought she did. “I don't want to be important,” he said, which was not the smallest understatement he'd ever made. “I don't, Erika, and that's the truth, too.”

A long silence followed. Heinrich hoped she would lose her temper, hang up on him, and either leave him alone or just think of him as her husband's friend—somebody who was fun to drink wine with and a decent bridge player, but nothing more than that.

What he hoped for and what he got were two different things. “Well, at least you know your own mind,” Erika said at last. “At least you've got a mind to know. You don't do all of your thinking below the belt. I like that. It's different in a man.”

Did she realize how much of her own thinking she was doing below the belt? Not as far as Heinrich could see, she didn't. He almost pointed it out to her. At the last minute, he didn't. Talking with her about things below the belt struck him as a very bad idea.

“I'd better go,” was what he did say. “Is there a message for Willi?”

“Tell him I hope Ilse gives him the clap,” Erika answered
promptly. “He won't have the chance to give it to me, and you can tell him that, too.” She did hang up then, loudly.

Heinrich hung up, too. Rubbing at his ear, he pulled a message pad from his top desk drawer.
Erika called while you were out,
he wrote.
No need to call her back
. If she wanted to deliver any more forceful message, she could do it herself. He put the small sheet of yellow paper on Willi's desk. It didn't spontaneously combust. As he retreated to his own desk, he wondered why.

Willi came back to the office about half an hour later. He looked almost indecently pleased with himself—and that probably was the word for it, too. Ilse, by contrast, just sat down and started typing. Willi picked up the message. “What's this?” he said. He read it and set it down, then started to laugh. He looked over at Heinrich. “What did she really say?”

“You can ask her yourself and find out,” Heinrich answered.

“No, thanks.” Willi laughed again. “She thinks the world revolves around her. High time she finds out she's wrong.”

Don't you do the same?
Heinrich wondered. But he couldn't ask Willi that, any more than he could have asked Erika about the way she thought. Neither one of them would have taken the question seriously, and they both would have got angry at him. He wanted that no more than he wanted any other kind of notice.

Willi said, “You're our fair-haired boy right now. Why don't you fix Erika up with Buckliger? That would make everybody happy.”

“You really are out of your mind!” Heinrich exclaimed in horror.

“Thank you,” Willi said, which only disconcerted him more. “I thought it was the—what do you call it?—the elegant solution, that's what I'm trying to say.”

“Shall I tell you all the things that are wrong with it?” Heinrich asked. “How much time have you got? Have you got all day? Have you got all week?”

“What I've got is a report to write.” Willi looked lugubrious. “The boss wants it this afternoon, too. I'm going to have to rush like hell to finish it on time.”

“You wouldn't, if—” Heinrich broke off. Telling Willi he'd have less to do now if he hadn't spent a long, long lunchtime screwing his secretary was true. Some true things, though, just weren't helpful.

“Yes, Mommy,” Willi said, which proved this was indeed one of those things.

“All right. All right.” Nothing annoyed Heinrich like being condescended to. “But if you're going to complain about what you've got to do, you'd better have a look at what you've been doing.”

“I did. A nice, close look, too.” Willi's expression left no doubt what he meant.

Heinrich found nothing to say to that, which was no doubt exactly what Willi'd had in mind. Shaking his head, he went back to work. Over at the other desk, Willi looked as desperately busy as a man juggling knives and torches. He would type like a man possessed, then shift to the calculator, mutter at the results, and go back to the keyboard.

At five o'clock, Heinrich got up. He put on his coat and his cap. “I'm heading for the bus stop,” he said. “Are you coming?”

“No, dammit.” Willi shook his head, looking harassed. “I'm still busy.”

“Too bad,” Heinrich said, and left. Willi stared after him, then plunged back into the report.

W
HEN
S
USANNA
W
EISS LISTENED TO THE RADIO IN HER OFFICE
, she usually hunted for Mozart or Handel or Haydn or Beethoven or Bach. Verdi or Vivaldi would do in a pinch. The Italians were reckoned frivolous, but they were still allies; you couldn't get in trouble for listening to them.

She sometimes let Wagner blare out into the hallway, too. That was protective coloration, pure and simple, and not only because she despised him as an anti-Semite. No matter how the Nazis had slobbered over him for the past eighty years and more, she couldn't take him seriously.

A lone, lorn woman stands upon a stage trying to make herself heard,
an Englishman had written at the start of the twentieth century.
One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman's voice to be heard above their din
. She'd seen it that way long before she ran into Jerome K. Jerome. Now she couldn't even listen to Wagner without wanting to giggle.

These days, though, less classical music lilted from the radio. She tuned it to the news station more and more often. A lot of what she heard was the same wretched sort of propaganda she'd avoided for years. A lot of it, but not all. Every so often, startling things came out of the speaker. She listened in the hope of hearing more of them.

Whenever the
Führer
made a speech, she found herself urging him on, thinking,
You can do it. I know you can
. And sometimes Heinz Buckliger would, and sometimes he
wouldn't. Sometimes he was flat and pedestrian, praising manufacture or agriculture or the Hitler Youth. Then, as she had with too many boyfriends, she decided she'd been fooling herself. She'd been right about the boyfriends. About Buckliger…

The trouble with Buckliger was, he could be astonishing. She was discussing a midterm with a student who had trouble understanding why he'd got only a 73. Susanna knew why—he wasn't too bright and he hadn't studied too hard. However much she wanted to, she couldn't come right out and say that. She had the radio on, not very loud, as she went over the exam with him point by point. It was one of those painful conferences. If the student worked harder, he might get a 76 next time, or even a 78. He would never blossom and get a 92.

Susanna hardly listened to herself as she explained all the myriad ways he'd misunderstood the Old English riddles he'd tried to interpret. More of her attention was on Heinz Buckliger, who was speaking to an audience of German female pharmacists. He'd been blathering on about how pharmacists were vital for the health of the
Reich,
and how the women's group to which he was speaking had a long history of devoted service. It didn't seem one of his more inspired efforts.

But then, with just a few words, everything changed. Buckliger went on, “We must examine the history of the
Reich
in the same way: that which is good, and also that which is not so good. We must not flinch from finding and noting our forefathers' failures.”

“
Fräulein Doktor
Professor, I think you should raise my grade because—”

“Wait,” Susanna said. The student tried to go on talking. She waved a hand at him. “Hush. I want to hear this.” He couldn't very well complain, not when she was listening to the
Führer
. He still looked…aggrieved. Susanna didn't care.

“Those who complain about the recent emphasis on the first edition of
Mein Kampf
ignore certain essential facts,” Heinz Buckliger went on. “It is perfectly obvious that inadequate representation by the
Volk
was at the root of past
illegalities, arbitrariness, and repression—crimes based on abuse of power.”

“Professor Weiss—” The student tried again.

“Hush, I told you,” Susanna snapped. The female pharmacists were applauding the
Führer,
but hesitantly, as if they weren't sure what they were hearing. Susanna was. She just wasn't sure she could believe her ears. What Buckliger was saying was true—was, in fact, a colossal understatement. But that the
Führer
of the Greater German
Reich
should say even so much…!

And Buckliger wasn't done. He said, “The responsibility of past National Socialist leaders”—he didn't name Hitler or Himmler, but whom else could he mean?—“and those close to them for undoubted repressions and illegalities is both difficult to forgive and difficult to admit. But we must. Even now, writers try to ignore important questions in our history. They try to pretend nothing out of the ordinary occurred. This is wrong. It neglects historical reality, of which we all must be aware.”

He paused for applause. He got…a little. Had Susanna been in the audience, she would have been on her feet whooping and hollering. The student tried to get her to pay attention to his earnest, inept essay again. She silenced him with a glare.

“Everyone's dearest wish,” Buckliger went on, “is for the
Reich
and its ideology to stay unchanging for the thousand years Hitler promised us. But history does not work that way, however much we wish it did. We will either find ways to develop or we will stagnate and fail and go under.”

Murmurs said the pharmacists didn't know what to make of the hard truths Buckliger was telling them. And even the
Führer
seemed to wonder if he'd gone too far. He quickly added, “Fascism has offered to the world its answers to the fundamental questions of human life, at the center of which stands the
Volk
. The errors we may have made will not, must not, turn us from the path we embarked upon in 1933. We are traveling to the New Order, to the world of the
Reich
and the
Volk
. We shall never leave that road.”

There, at last, he gave the earnest women who'd come to
hear him something they could get their teeth into. They cheered thunderously. Susanna wanted to yawn. The speech continued, but only in banalities.

“
Fräulein Doktor
Professor—” The student was nothing if not persistent.

“
Ja, ja
.” Susanna realized she would have to get rid of him so she could think. She pointed to the essay. “You do understand that the ostensible answer to this riddle here is
a key
. That gets you a passing grade. But you don't see all the double meanings hiding underneath. What else might a man have on his hip that could fill a hole if he hiked up his clothes?”

“Excuse me?” The student stared at her as if she'd suddenly started spouting Hindustani. “I'm very sorry, but—” He broke off. She could tell exactly when he did get it. His stare changed from one sort to another altogether. He blushed like a schoolgirl. Prone to such problems herself, Susanna knew a good blush when she saw one. “But…But…” He sputtered, then tried again: “But this…this is a
text, Fräulein Doktor
Professor!”

“It's a text now,” Susanna said. “It's a text to you. But to the man who wrote it, it was a riddle, it was a joke. And if you can't see the joke, well, I'm sorry, but you don't deserve anything more than a bare pass.”

He tried to argue some more, but he couldn't, or not very well. He was both demoralized and embarrassed. Had he been a dog, he would have had his tail between his legs as he left her office.

For a wonder, no one else came in right away to complain about the exam. That left Susanna a few minutes to marvel at what she'd just heard. Heinz Buckliger had been careful about what he did. He'd surrounded the meat in his speech with clouds of puffy, obscuring rhetoric. But the meat was there. He'd admitted the Nazi regime had made mistakes. He'd also admitted it had covered them up. And he'd admitted it shouldn't have.

Once he'd done that much, gone that far, what else was left? Only spelling out what the mistakes had been. Would Buckliger have the nerve to do that? Would anyone else, now that the
Führer
had given permission? Maybe so, if
people started to see that telling the truth didn't mean a trip to a camp or a bullet in the back of the neck.

Susanna could hardly wait to find out.

 

Lise Gimpel was sorting laundry—a labor of Sisyphus if ever there was one—when the girls came home from school. Francesca, for once, didn't start complaining about the Beast right away. She and Roxane went into the kitchen to fix themselves snacks. Roxane opened the refrigerator. “Olives! Yum!” she exclaimed. Her older sisters made disgusted noises. Except for Heinrich, she was the only one in the family who really liked them.

Alicia hunted up Lise instead of getting a snack. She sat down on the bed beside her and said, “We talked about the
Führer
's speech in class today.”

“Did you?” Lise's mind was still more on socks and underwear than the classroom.

“We sure did.” Alicia nodded solemnly. “Did he really say the
Reich
did things that were wrong, things that were against the law?”

“I think he did,” Lise answered. “I can't say for certain, though. I didn't hear the speech.”

“Well, suppose he did.” Alicia waited till Lise nodded to show she was supposing. Her oldest daughter looked out the bedroom door to make sure Francesca and Roxane couldn't hear, then went on in a low voice, “Does that mean he thinks the
Reich
was wrong about what it did to Jews?”

“I don't know,” Lise said. “What people did to Jews wasn't against the law, though, because they made laws ahead of time that said they could do those things.”

“But it was wrong,” Alicia said fiercely.

“Oh, yes. It was wrong. I think so just as much as you do. But—” Lise broke off and put both hands on Alicia's shoulders. “The people who run things probably don't think it was wrong. You have to remember that. And even if they say they do think it was wrong, we can't just come out and go, ‘Oh, yes, here we are. Now we can get on with our lives again.'”

“Why not?” Plainly, Alicia wanted to do exactly that.

“Because it might be a trap. They might be trying to lure
us out so they can get rid of us once and for all. The Nazis have been killing us for almost eighty years. Why should they stop now?”

Alicia bit her lip. She was, after all, only eleven years old. “Would they do such a thing?” she whispered.

“Would they? I don't know,” Lise answered. “Could they? You tell me, sweetheart. What do they teach you about Jews in school?”

“Nasty things.” Alicia made a face. “Horrible things. You know that.”

“Well, yes, I do,” Lise said. “I wanted to make sure you did.”

“Oh.” Alicia thought that over, then nodded. “I'm going to go get a snack before sisters eat everything good in the house.” She ran out of the bedroom and started gabbing with Francesca and Roxane. She didn't even tease Roxane about the olives. To her, they weren't part of everything good in the house, and Roxane was welcome to them.

Lise went back to stacking socks and underwear into neat piles, one for each person in the family. She wished there were a laundry fairy to do the job for her, but no such luck. If she didn't do it, nobody would. Heinrich, at least, put away his own clean clothes without being told. The girls…Lise wished for a laundry fairy again.

She also wished she could share Alicia's optimism. She wanted to, maybe more than anything else in all the world. She hated living in hiding, hated fearing a knock on the door that could mean the end not just for her but for everybody she loved. Feeling she carried the weight of the world hadn't been easy when she was a child, and hadn't got any easier now that she'd grown up.

But I do,
she thought miserably.
We all do, the handful of us who are left. If we let go, if we give up—or if, God forbid, we get caught—a world goes with us
.

“Why have you got yipes stripes, Mommy?” There stood Roxane in the doorway, holding an olive impaled on a toothpick.

“Have I?” Lise was sure she did. She tried to make the frown lines leave her forehead. “There. Is that better?”

“A little,” Roxane said dubiously.

“How about this?” Lise stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.

Roxane giggled. That suggested some improvement. But then the youngest Gimpel girl said, “You didn't tell me why you had them in the first place.” Her stubborn streak was as wide as she was. It would probably help make her a good Jew when she got old enough to find out she was one. In the meantime…In the meantime, it made her hard to distract.

“Grown-up stuff,” Lise answered. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
Not yet. Not for another few years. And when you do find out, you'll be one more who knows—and one more who can give us away
. Letting children know what they were was the hardest part of this secret life. Considering the rest of it, that was no small statement.