In the Presence of Mine Enemies (5 page)

Francesca asked the question Alicia had been dreading: “Well, what did you do when you got to stay up late last night?”

Behind Alicia, her mother suddenly stopped bustling about the kitchen. She stood still and quiet, waiting to hear what her oldest daughter would say—and maybe to jump in and help if she had to. “It wasn't very exciting,” Alicia answered, as casually as she could. “Just a lot of talk. Grownups.” She rolled her eyes. If she exaggerated, it wouldn't hurt, not here. Francesca already knew what she thought of grownups.

Her sister accepted what she said. Her mother started moving again, as if she'd only just noticed she'd stopped. And Alicia…Alicia was sunk in misery. She couldn't ever remember lying to Francesca before.

The girls got their books and went to the bus stop on the corner. Older girls in tan uniforms like Alicia's, older boys in brown Hitler Youth togs, and younger children dressed every which way waited for the school bus. “Hello, Alicia,” said Emma Handrick, who lived a few doors away. “Did you get the math homework?”

“Sure,” Alicia said, surprised Emma needed to ask; she almost always got the homework.

“Can I copy it from you on the way to school?” Emma asked eagerly. “Please? My mother said she'd clobber me if I got another lousy grade.”

She'd asked before. Alicia had always said no. Her father and mother had taught her only to do her own work. They said anything else was dishonest. She'd gone along with that; it fit the way she thought. But today everything
seemed up in the air. If she said no, would the neighbor girl denounce her as a Jew? Whatever else happened, that couldn't. Not just her safety rode on it. So did her sisters' and her parents'. She nodded and smiled. “All right.”

Emma's rather doughy face lit up in surprised delight. Francesca and Roxane looked horrified. Roxane had an I'm-going-to-tell expression on her face. Most of the time, that would have worried Alicia. Now she had bigger things to worry about. She felt like Atlas (her class had done Greek mythology the year before), with the weight of the heavens on her shoulders.

The school bus stopped at the corner. The doors hissed open. The children got on. A couple of Alicia's friends waved to her. She waved back, but found a seat with Emma. Her sisters perched together on another pair of seats. Their backs were stiff with disapproval at first, but then they started talking with friends of their own and forgot Alicia's scandalous behavior—for the time being, anyhow.

“You're a lifesaver,” Emma said, her pencil racing over the paper. She finished the last problem—they were multiplying fractions—as the bus pulled into the schoolyard. “I even think I see how to do them myself.”

“That's good,” Alicia said. She wasn't sure she believed it. She was pretty sure she
didn't
believe it, in fact. Emma would never be one of the smartest people in the class, which was putting it mildly. But hearing it salved Alicia's conscience.

She put the homework back in her folder and got off the bus. Francesca and Roxane waved as they hurried to the lines in front of their classrooms. Maybe they'd forgiven her sin. Maybe. She took her own place in line—right in front of Emma, in alphabetical order.

At precisely eight o'clock, the classroom door opened. “Come in, children,” the teacher boomed.

“
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler,” Alicia and the rest of the class chorused. All over the schoolyard, other classes were greeting their teachers the same way. They all marched into the classrooms in perfect step—well, not quite so perfect in the younger grades.

Again with the others, Alicia set her books and papers on her desk and stood at attention behind her chair. She faced the swastika flag that hung by the door, but her eyes were on
Herr
Kessler. He stood so stiff, he might have turned to stone. (Alicia thought of Perseus and the Gorgon.)

Suddenly, the teacher's right arm shot up and out.
“Heil!”
he barked.

Alicia and her classmates also honored the flag with the German salute.
“Heil!”
they said. Till this morning, she'd been proud to salute the flag. Why not? Till this morning, she'd been an Aryan among Aryans, one who deserved that privilege. Now? Now everything seemed different. No one else knew what she was, but she did, and the knowledge ate at her. Hadn't Hitler himself called Jews parasites on the nation? Alicia felt like an enormous cockroach. For a wild, frightening moment, she wondered if anyone else could see her metamorphosis.

Evidently not.
Herr
Kessler got to work on grammar: which prepositions took the dative, which the accusative, and which both and with what changes of meaning. Alicia had no trouble with any of that. But some people did—Emma, for instance. Alicia knew the Handricks had the televisor on all the time; she'd heard her mother talk about it. Even so, if you listened to how educated people talked, if you paid any attention at all, how could you make mistakes? Emma did, and she wasn't the only one.
Herr
Kessler made notations in the roll book in red ink. Emma's mother was liable to clobber her in spite of the arithmetic homework she'd got from Alicia.

History and geography came next. The teacher pulled down a big map of the world that hung above the blackboard. The Germanic Empire, shown in the blood-red of the flag, stretched from England deep into Siberia and India. Paler red showed lands occupied but not formally annexed: France, the United States, Canada. In the Empire's shadow were the little realms of the allied nations: Sweden's gold, Finland's pale blue, the greens of Hungary and Portugal, Romania's dark blue, purple for Spain and Bulgaria, and the yellow of the Italian Empire around the
Mediterranean. Africa was mostly red, too, though Portugal, Spain, and Italy kept their colonies on the dark continent and the Aryan-dominated Union of South Africa was another ally, not a conquest.

Only the Empire of Japan, with Southeast Asia, China, the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and Australia all shown in yellow, came anywhere close to matching the Germanic Empire in size. The Japanese were strong enough to survive for the time being, not strong enough to make serious rivals for the
Reich
.

“And the Japanese, of course, are not Aryans,”
Herr
Kessler said. “Because of this, they have no true creativity of their own. Already they have fallen behind us in technology, and they will fall further behind with each passing year. Our triumph may not come soon, but it is sure.” The children nodded solemnly. They knew how important being an Aryan was. Alicia did—all the more so now that she realized she wasn't one.

Math came next. They passed in their homework and did problems on the blackboard. Alicia got hers right. Emma botched hers.
Herr
Kessler frowned. He flipped through papers. “You were correct on your homework,” he rumbled ominously. “Why do you fall down here?”

“I don't know,
Herr
Kessler,” Emma said. “I'm sorry,
Herr
Kessler.” She sounded sorry, too—sorry about what would happen to her when her mother found out she wasn't doing so well.

“Your paper from last night is as good as Alicia Gimpel's,” the teacher said, and Alicia's heart leaped into her mouth. Had he realized Emma was copying? But he only set the homework down and went on, “Now you must learn to follow through, as Alicia has done.”

“
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!” Emma didn't seem worried about cheating. How many times had she copied work before, and from how many different students? Enough to take it for granted—that was plain.

Oddly, Emma's matter-of-factness helped Alicia at lunch. If Emma could keep the teacher from suspecting she was a cheater, why couldn't Alicia keep anyone from suspecting she was a Jew? Emma left evidence, if only
Herr
Kessler had looked more closely. Alicia didn't: no
Hamantaschen
in her lunch pail, no mark of Cain on her forehead.
Father was right,
she thought with enormous relief.
If I don't make a silly mistake, no one will think I'm anything but what I've always seemed to be
. And one of the things she'd always been was somebody who despised mistakes of any kind, and especially silly ones.

The afternoon turned out to be a snap. She was good in science, and good enough at the computer keyboard—like her father, she was less than graceful, and couldn't type as fast as some of her classmates, but she was accurate. No one gave her any trouble going home, either. Her first day knowing she was a Jew, and she'd got away with it.

 

A three no-trump contract. Three tricks to play. Heinrich Gimpel needed to take all three to make it. No help in the dummy. Lise sat across the table from him, but they'd got where they were largely out of his hand. He didn't need
much
help; he held the ace and queen of spades and the ace of diamonds. But the king of spades remained unaccounted for. Did Willi Dorsch have it on his right, or did Erika on his left?

Willi had taken the last trick, so it was his lead. He grinned at Heinrich, who smiled back. They both knew what was what. Grinning still, Willi flipped out the jack of spades.

Heinrich kept smiling, too, as much by main force as anything else. Now he had to choose. If he played the queen and Erika had the king, he'd go down. If he played the ace and the king didn't drop, he'd also go down, because he'd have to lead the queen for the last trick, and the king would clobber it.

He glanced at Willi, who chuckled, enjoying his perplexity. Then he looked at Erika. She was worth looking at: heart-shaped face; blue, blue eyes; a wide, generous mouth; gilt hair that hung to her shoulders. However much he enjoyed the excuse to study—hell, to ogle—his friend's wife, though, all the study told him nothing about her hand. Erika took bridge seriously.

The ace or the queen? The lady or the tiger? The devil
or the deep blue sea? Heinrich looked back at Willi Dorsch. “You like to lead away from kings,” he remarked, and played the queen.

Erika sluffed a heart.

“Ha!” Heinrich said in triumph. He laid down the last two aces. “Made it!”

“Dammit!” Willi said. He laid down the king of spades and the king of diamonds.

“That's the rubber,” Erika said sadly. She wrote in the scorebook.

Lise said, “Willi, if you'd led the diamond we would have gone down. Heinrich would have had to take. Then he would have led the ace of spades, and you would have dropped the jack—and had the king waiting for the queen.”

Willi thought for a couple of seconds, then said, “Dammit,” again, on a different note this time.

“I've spent the last fifteen years trying to teach him not to do things like that, and I haven't had any luck,” Erika said. “I don't think you will, either.”

“I'm a stubborn goose,” Willi remarked, with a certain amount of pride. He gathered up the cards and swept them into a neat pile. “Have we got time for another rubber?”

“What time
is
it?” Heinrich looked at his watch. “A quarter past twelve.” He raised his eyes to Lise. “What will your sister say?”

“That we're pushing it,” she answered. She turned to Erika Dorsch and spread her hands. “You know how it is. You don't want to get your best babysitter mad at you, because if you do you'll never get out of the house again.”

“Oh, yes.” Erika nodded. The Dorsches' son and daughter were asleep in their bedrooms.
They
hadn't had to worry about babysitters tonight. And Heinrich hadn't had to worry about bringing Alicia along.
Maybe she'll talk to Katarina about things, if her sisters give her the chance,
he thought.
That will help. She thinks Aunt Käthe's interesting. Lise and I are just—Mama and Papa
.

Willi got to his feet. “Don't disappear quite yet. I'll fix one for the road.” He headed off into the kitchen.

“Oh, good heavens. My back teeth are already floating.” Lise headed off, too, in the direction of the bathroom.

That left Heinrich briefly alone with Erika Dorsch. In a film, he would have run a finger around the inside of his collar. He'd never quite figured out whether she knew how provocative she was. Had things been otherwise, he might have been tempted to find out. As they were…every once in a while, he was tempted to find out anyhow. He'd never yielded to temptation. Too much rode on it.

All she said was, “You played that well,” which hardly encouraged fantasies.

Heinrich shrugged. “I thought it was the best chance I had to make. And the four of us have been playing bridge a long time. I know how Willi's beady little mind works.” He grinned to make sure Erika didn't take him seriously.

She smiled, too, but only for a moment. “You think about things,” she said in musing tones. “And you think other people—even women—can think about things, too.” She paused, then added, “I wonder if Lise has any idea how lucky she is.” She eyed him speculatively.