In the Presence of Mine Enemies (45 page)

They could take that any way they wanted. Willi took it the way Heinrich had intended. He waggled his palm back
and forth. “So-so,” he said. “We have our ups and downs.” Never one to leave a setup line alone, he finished, “Maybe not as often as when I was twenty-two, but we manage.”

You'd manage more if it weren't for Ilse. Even you know that
. Heinrich didn't say it. He did wonder whether Erika would, and how he could deflect her if she started to. Fortunately, she kept quiet. Heinrich wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of the look she sent Willi, though.

“Let me go open the wine,” Lise said. “Why doesn't everybody else sit down?”

Willi dealt the first hand. “And now to give myself thirteen diamonds,” he said grandly.

“As long as you give me thirteen hearts, I don't mind,” Heinrich said.

Reality returned as soon as he picked up his hand, which showed the usual mixture of suits and ten points. Willi opened with a club. Heinrich passed. Erika said, “Two clubs,” which meant she had some support for Willi but not a great deal. He took it to three, after which everybody passed. And he made three clubs with no overtricks but without much trouble.

“A leg,” he said as Erika wrote their sixty points under the line.

Heinrich gathered up the cards and started shuffling. “The only thing legs are good for is getting chopped off,” he observed. He dealt out the next hand and opened with a spade. After a lively auction, he and Lise got to four spades. Willi doubled. If they made it, they would take the game and wipe out the Dorsches' partial score. If they went down, it would get expensive above the line.

Erika led a heart; Willi had been bidding them. When Lise laid out the dummy, Heinrich got an unpleasant surprise. He had the ace, queen, ten, and nine of spades, plus a little one. His wife had four little spades to the eight. That left the king and jack conspicuously missing, along with two little ones to protect them. Considering the other problems he had in the hand, it also left him in trouble.

Willi took the trick with the king of hearts, then led the ace. When that went through without getting trumped, he grinned at Heinrich and said, “Got you.”

“Maybe.” Heinrich shrugged. He thought Willi had him, too, but he was damned if he'd admit it.

“No maybes about it.” Willi led a diamond. That wasn't the way to finish Heinrich off. He had the ace in his hand, while the king was on the board. He decided he would rather be in the dummy, so he took the trick with the king. Then he led a small spade from the dummy. Willi played another one. Heinrich hesitated, but only for a moment. He set down the ten. Behind the cards of the dummy, Lise blinked.

He felt like shouting when Erika sluffed a club. That meant Willi had all the opposition's spades. No wonder he'd doubled. But it also meant…Happily, Heinrich said, “I'm going to finesse you right out of your shoes.”

Willi looked revolted. Heinrich didn't blame him a bit. Had he been sitting in that chair instead of this one, he would have been revolted, too. And he had plenty of board entries, so he could get back to the dummy whenever he needed to. He pulled Willi's trumps, one by one; Willi couldn't make any of them good. And he made the contract—doubled.

“A deep finesse,” Willi said mournfully. “Who would have thought
you
would run a deep finesse? And who would have thought it would work?”

“I had to,” Heinrich answered. “It was the only way I even had a chance to make four. So I thought, why not?”

“That's the way to do it,” Erika said. “If you've got one chance—take it.” She looked right at him as she said that. He passed her the cards in a hurry. He knew too well she wasn't talking about bridge.

In spite of that hand, she and Willi won the rubber. They didn't win by as much as they would have if Willi hadn't doubled. Erika let Willi hear about that when it was over. He gave her a dirty look. “We won,” he said. “Quit complaining.”

If that wasn't calculated to annoy her, it certainly did the job. The only way Heinrich found to make them stop bickering was to bring out a fresh bottle of wine, a fancy burgundy. It made Willi wonder aloud whether he'd robbed a bank or started taking kickbacks from the Americans. Heinrich didn't care. If Willi was teasing him,
he wasn't throwing darts at Erika. When he wasn't, he was good company—and so was she. Of course, the more they drank, the less they were liable to care what they said. Heinrich knew he might only be putting off trouble. If he didn't put it off, though, he already had it inside the door.

He and Lise won the next rubber. All the hands were cut and dried. Nobody could complain about anyone's play. That relieved Heinrich. How fast the bottle of burgundy emptied didn't, especially since Willi and Erika drank more of it than Lise and he did. He didn't begrudge them the wine. But he feared it wouldn't just be
in vino veritas. In vino calamitas
seemed much more likely.

The third rubber also went well enough. Erika and Willi won it as smoothly and as competently as he and Lise had taken the second. Heinrich's only bad moment came when Erika started loudly praising the first edition of
Mein Kampf
. But he could even cautiously agree with her. She couldn't be far wrong if the
Führer
was saying the same thing.

Because the first three rubbers had gone briskly, they decided to play another one. Lise, who drank the least of the four of them, broke out another bottle of wine. However much Heinrich wanted to, he couldn't yell,
My God, what are you doing?
Since he couldn't, he waited numbly—quite numbly, since he'd had a good bit himself—to see what happened next.

What happened next was that Willi went down three on a hand he should have been able to make with his eyes closed. Considering the way he played it, he might have had them closed all through it. When it was finally over, he looked at his tricks and the defenders' like a man contemplating a traffic accident he'd caused. “Well,” he said in tones of rueful surprise, “
that
didn't work.”

“I'll tell you why it didn't work, too,” Erika said. “It didn't work because you're an idiot.”

“I don't know what I could have—” Willi began.

She told him. She told him in great detail. And she was quite obviously right. Then she said, “If you can't hit the target any better with Ilse, she's got an—”

Heinrich and Lise both said something, anything, to keep Erika from finishing that sentence. Afterwards, Heinrich never could remember what had burst from his lips, or from his wife's. Erika
didn't
finish, either: a triumph of sorts. But only of sorts, for enough of the damage was already done. Willi went a hot crimson color; his skin might have belonged to a perfectly ripe apple.

“You've got a lot of damned nerve complaining about me,” he said, his voice low and rough and furious. “You're the one who wants to—”

“Enough!” That wasn't Heinrich but Lise. She rarely raised her voice. When she did, as now, surprise made everyone pay attention to her. She went on, “There's a time and a place for everything, and this isn't the time and the place for that.”

The Dorsches could easily have erupted. If they had, the friendship probably would have exploded right there at the bridge table. Heinrich waited. The shrapnel from that explosion would tear into him, not into his wife. But it didn't come. Erika and Willi kept on glaring at each other, but neither one of them said anything new and inflammatory.

After a long, long moment, Erika turned to Lise and said, “You make good sense. I see where Heinrich gets it.”

“Oh,
Quatsch,
” Lise said. “Now I have to figure out which one of us you just insulted.” She gathered up the cards. “In the meantime, can we play some bridge? Hitting each other over the head with rocks is a different game, and it shouldn't be a spectator sport.”

“What do you know about it?” Willi asked, half blustering, half amused. “You and Heinrich never do it.”

She and Heinrich both laughed raucously. Heinrich knew their marriage had its creaks and strains, as what marriage does not? He could put his finger on four or five without even thinking. No doubt Lise could do the same. And no doubt some of his wouldn't be the same as some of hers, which was in itself a strain. But none of that was anybody's business but his and Lise's.

That thought led him to the next one: “We just try not to do it when other people are watching.”

“Oh, but having other people watch is half the fun,” Willi said. Erika nodded. There, for once, she agreed with her husband.

Heinrich, on the other hand, did his best to hide a shudder. Little green men from Mars could have had no more alien an attitude. Put your life on display, as if you were characters on a daytime televisor drama? He couldn't imagine living like that. One of the reasons he and Lise got on so well was that she was as intensely private a person as he was.

“Whose deal is it, anyhow?” Willi asked, as easily as if he and Erika hadn't been shelling each other a couple of minutes before. “Let's see if I can butcher another one, eh?” Erika stirred. Suddenly, she jerked in surprise. Had Lise kicked her under the table? Heinrich had trouble imagining his wife doing such a thing. He also had trouble finding any other reason Erika would have jerked like that.

Willi did win the contract, at three diamonds. He made it. Heinrich hadn't been sure he would, but he did. If anything, that left Heinrich relieved. He wasn't used to rooting for the opposition. He didn't much like it. It took the competitive edge off the bridge.

The Dorsches won the rubber. Again, Heinrich wasn't sorry, and wished he were. Usually, they would have talked and drunk for a while after they set down the cards—or maybe they just would have played some more. Tonight, Willi and Erika got up and left with only the most perfunctory good-byes. Heinrich and Lise didn't ask them to stay longer, even in the most perfunctory way.

“Are we going to be able to have them over any more, or to go to their place?” Lise asked once they'd gone. “The bridge is all very well, but some things are more trouble than they're worth.”

“Yes, I know,” Heinrich said. He also feared he knew what Willi had been about to say when Lise forestalled him. After Erika jabbed him about Ilse, he would have jabbed her about making a play for Heinrich. If things had been bad, had been ugly, before then, how much worse and uglier would they have got afterwards?

Heinrich was a man who thought in quantitative terms. If he couldn't put numbers to something, it didn't feel real to him. He couldn't put numbers to this, but, for once, he didn't need to. It would have been about as bad as it could get.

 

Alicia Gimpel didn't like December. The sun rose late and set early, and clouds and fog were so thick you mostly couldn't see it when it did sneak into the sky. It rained a lot of the time. When it didn't rain, sometimes it snowed. Some people said they liked having seasons—it made them enjoy spring and summer more. Alicia couldn't fathom that. She wished she lived somewhere like Italy, where it was warm and nice almost all year round.

The only thing December had going for it was Christmas. She liked the tree and its spicy smell and the ornaments and gifts. She liked the fat roast goose her mother cooked every year. She liked the break from school she got at Christmas and New Year's. And, of course, she liked the presents.

This year, though, she looked at Christmas in a new way. Up till now, it had always been
her
holiday. If she was a Jew, though, it was someone else's holiday. Her family would still do the same things: she was sure of that. They would have to; if they didn't, people would wonder why not. But what they did wouldn't feel the same.

Then something else occurred to her. Jews had their own New Year's Day. They had other holidays of their own, too. She remembered Purim, when she'd found out she was a Jew. She asked her mother, “Do we have a holiday of our own that's like Christmas?”

Lise Gimpel was frying potato pancakes fragrant with onion in a big pan of hot oil. “Where are your sisters?” was the first thing she asked.

“They're upstairs,” Alicia answered.

Her mother looked around to make sure Alicia was right. Then she answered. “We have a holiday at this time of year. It's called Chanukah.” She told of Antiochus' war against the Jews more than 2,100 years before, and of the oil that burned for eight days instead of just one.

Alicia listened, entranced. Then, as was her way, she started thinking about what she'd heard. “The Persians wanted to get rid of us,” she said. Her mother nodded. “And these Syrians or Greeks or whatever they were wanted to get rid of us.” Mommy nodded again. Alicia went on, “And the Nazis wanted to get rid of us, too.”

“You know that's true,” her mother said. “They still do. Never forget it.”

“I won't. I can't,” Alicia said. “But what did we ever do to make so many people want to wipe us out?”