In the Presence of Mine Enemies (62 page)

 

Another department staff meeting. Another dimly lit conference room foggy and stinking with Franz Oppenhoff's cigar smoke and innumerable cigarettes and pipes. Susanna Weiss drew a face hidden by a pig-snouted gas mask. Wishful thinking, unfortunately. She scratched out the sketch. As it vanished, she wondered why she bothered bringing a pad to these gatherings. Nothing worth noting ever got said.

At the head of the long table, the chairman stood up. Professor Oppenhoff waited till all eyes were on him. Then, after a couple of wet coughs, he said, “A change is coming. It is a change for which we must all prepare ourselves.”

“The budget?” Half a dozen anxious voices said the same thing at the same time.

But Oppenhoff shook his head. “No, not the budget. The budget is as it should be, or close enough. I speak of a more fundamental change.” If he'd been trying to get everyone's attention, he'd succeeded. Even Susanna looked his way. What could be more fundamental to a university department
than its funding? Oppenhoff nodded portentously. “I speak of the changes that may come to pass in the
Reich
itself.”

Two or three professors who cared about nothing more recent than the transition from Old High German to Middle High German leaned back in their leather-upholstered chairs and closed their eyes. One of them began to snore, and so quickly that he must have had a clear conscience. Susanna, by contrast, leaned forward. This was liable to be interesting after all.

And if the department chairman expected
her
to review the political situation again, she would, but he might not care for what she had to say. Like a lot of people in the Greater German
Reich,
she thought she could get away with much more than she had only a few months before.

But Professor Oppenhoff did not call on her. Instead, ponderously leaning forward, he spoke for himself: “Changes, I say again, may come to pass in the
Reich
itself. There has been much talk of openness and revitalization, some of it from those most highly placed in the state. And a certain amount of this is, no doubt, good and useful, as anyone will recognize.”

He paused to draw on his cigar.
Now that he's shown he can say nice things about reform, what will he do next?
Susanna wondered, and promptly answered her own question.
He'll start flying his true colors, that's what
.

Just as promptly, Oppenhoff proved her right. “In all this rush toward change for the sake of change, we must not lose sight of what nearly eighty years of National Socialist rule have given the
Reich,
” he said. “When the first
Führer
came to power, we were weak and defeated. Now we rule the greatest empire the world has ever known. We were at the mercy of Jews and Communists. We have eliminated the problems they presented.”

We've killed them all, is what you mean
. Susanna's nails bit into the soft flesh of her palms.
Not quite all, you pompous son of a bitch
.

“All this being so,” Oppenhoff continued, “some of you might perhaps do well to wonder why any fundamental changes in the structure of the government are deemed necessary. If you feel that way, as I must confess I do my
self, you will also be able to find candidates who support a similar point of view.”

Puff, puff, puff. “Change for the sake of change is no doubt very exciting, very dramatic. But when things are going well, change is also apt to be for the worst. Some of you are younger than I. Many of you, in fact, are younger than I.” Oppenhoff chuckled rheumily. That was about as close to anything resembling real humor as he came. “You will, perhaps, be more enamored of change for the sake of change than I am. But I tell you this: when you have my years, you too will see the folly of change when the German state has gone through the grandest and most glorious period in its history.”

With a wheeze and a grunt, he sat down. His chair creaked as his bulk settled into it. Susanna couldn't have said why she was so disappointed. She'd known Oppenhoff was a reactionary for years. Why should one more speech make her want to cry—or, better, to kick him where it would do the most good?

Maybe it was because, in spite of everything, she'd let herself get her hopes up. Heinz Buckliger had done more to open the
Reich
than his three predecessors put together. He seemed intent on doing more still—and if he didn't, Rolf Stolle might. Some of the folk the
Wehrmacht
had conquered were reminding Berlin that they still remembered who they were, and that they'd once been free—and they were getting away with it.

Yes, the Security Police had grabbed Heinrich Gimpel and his children, but they'd let them go. The accusation that he was a Jew hadn't come from anyone who really knew, but from, of all things, a woman scorned. Susanna had trouble imagining anyone chasing Heinrich hard enough to want him dead when she didn't get him. It only went to show, you never could tell.

The point was, though, that they
had
let him go. In a world where that could happen, what couldn't? Heinrich's release only made Franz Oppenhoff's comfortable, complacent words seem all the worse.

Susanna almost burst with the temptation of throwing that in Oppenhoff's face. She'd sometimes morbidly won
dered which of the Jews she knew was likeliest to get caught. She'd thought she herself topped that list, just because she had the most trouble keeping her mouth shut when she ran into something wrong. Heinrich and Lise were almost stoic in the way they refused to let what went on around them bother them. Susanna was a great many things, but not a stoic. And yet here she sat, as safe and free as a Jew in the
Reich
could be. No, you never could tell.

“
Herr Doktor
Professor?” That was Konrad Lutze, who'd gone to the Medieval English Association meeting in London with Susanna—who'd almost gone instead of Susanna.

“Yes?” Oppenhoff smiled benignly.
Of course he does,
Susanna thought.
Lutze pisses standing up. How can he do anything wrong, with an advantage like that?

And then Lutze said, “
Herr Doktor
Professor, shouldn't we return to the first principles of National Socialism and let the
Volk
have the greatest possible say in the government of the
Reich
? Please excuse me, but I don't see how this could do anything but improve the way the
Reich
is run.”

Professor Oppenhoff looked as if he'd just taken a bite out of a hot South American pepper without expecting it. Susanna stared at Konrad Lutze, too, but with a different sort of astonishment. He was an indifferent scholar. Everyone in the department except possibly Oppenhoff knew that. She'd always figured him for more of a careerist than someone who truly loved knowledge. He was the last man she would have imagined sticking out his neck.

And he'd just thrown reform in the department chairman's face. What did that say? That Oppenhoff's politics were even more dinosaurian than Susanna had thought? What else
could
it say?

 

Back to work. Heinrich Gimpel climbed onto the bus that would take him to the Stahnsdorf train station. While he sat in prison, he'd wondered if he would have a job if he got out. It hadn't been his biggest worry. Next to a noodle or a shower, being alive and unemployed didn't look so bad.

But he still had his place. Nobody at
Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht
headquarters had said so out loud when he called to inquire, but he got the feeling his superiors there enjoyed putting him back in that slot, because it gave the armed forces a point in their unending game against the SS.

Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on the bus. His face brightened when he saw Heinrich. Then, almost as abruptly, it fell. The seat next to Heinrich was empty. Willi hesitantly approached. Heinrich patted the artificial leather to show he was welcome. (Back when Heinrich was a boy, people had called the stuff Jew's hide. You didn't hear that much any more. Till the reform movement started, Heinrich hadn't thought about it one way or the other. Now he dared hope it was a good sign.)

“It's damn good to see you,” Willi said, shaking his hand. With a wry smile that twisted up one corner of his mouth, he added, “You'd probably sooner knock my block off than look at me.”

“It's not your fault,” Heinrich said, and then, cautiously, “How's Erika?”

“She's…better. She's glad the girls are all right. She's glad you're all right, too.” That wry smile got wrier. “She wanted to find out just how good you could be, didn't she?”

“Well…yes.” Dull embarrassment filled Heinrich's voice.

“I never would have figured that,” Willi said. “And I really never would have figured that she'd go and call the Security Police. Sometimes I wonder if I know her at all. Now I suppose telling you I'm sorry is the least I can do.”

Being sorry wouldn't have mattered if the blackshirts had got rid of Heinrich—and of Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. Still…“It's over,” Heinrich said. “I hope to God it's over, anyhow.”

“Erika's sorry, too. If she weren't, she wouldn't have swallowed those stupid goddamn pills.” Willi shook his head. “She swears up and down she didn't think they would go after you and the girls the way they did.”

Heinrich only grunted. When she picked up the phone, what
had
Erika thought the Security Police would do? In
vite him up for coffee and cakes? Plainly, she'd regretted what she did afterwards. At the time? At the time, she'd no doubt wanted him dead.

He asked a question of his own: “Are the two of you really going to patch things up now, or will you go on squabbling?”
And cheating on each other,
he added, but only to himself. He always tried to stay polite—maybe even too polite for his own good.

Willi answered with a shrug. “I don't know what the hell we're going to do. If it weren't for the kids…But they're there, and we can't very well pretend they're not.” How much did he worry about his son and daughter when he took Ilse out for lunch and whatever else he could get away with? Maybe some. He did love them. Heinrich knew that. Love them or not, though, he went right on doing what
he
wanted to do.

At the train station, Heinrich shelled out fifteen pfennigs for a
Völkischer Beobachter
. So did Willi. As Heinrich carried the paper toward the platform, a sudden thought made him glance toward the other man. “When they grabbed me, did it make the news?” he asked.

“Ja,”
Willi answered uncomfortably. “A Jew in Berlin—I mean, somebody they thought was a Jew in Berlin—
is
news.”

“Did anybody say anything when they let me go?”

Now Willi looked at him as if he'd asked a very dumb question indeed. And so he had. “Don't be silly,” Willi said. “When was the last time the SS admitted it made a mistake? The twelfth of Never, that's when.”

The train rumbled up. Doors hissed open. Heinrich and Willi fed their cards into the fare slot, then sat down side by side and started reading their papers. The upcoming election dominated the headlines. Rolf Stolle had given another speech calling on the
Führer
to move harder and further on reforms. The
Völkischer Beobachter
covered it in detail, quoting some of the juiciest bits. A year earlier, even if the
Gauleiter
of Berlin had presumed to give such a speech, the
Beobachter
would have pretended he hadn't.

Out of the commuter train. Up the escalators. Onto the bus. Into downtown Berlin traffic. Willi looked out the win
dow and shook his head. He said, “I'm glad I'm not driving in this.”

“You'd have to be crazy to want to,” Heinrich agreed. But the swarms of cars clogging every street argued that a hell of a lot of people
were
crazy.

Out of the bus. Up the steps to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. Nods to the guards. Identification cards. One of the guards nudged his pal. “Hey, look, Adolf! Here's Gimpel back.”

Adolf nodded. “Good. I didn't figure you were really a kike,
Herr
Gimpel. The Security Police couldn't grab their ass with both hands.”

“I'm here.” Heinrich pocketed his card once more. What would Adolf have said, knowing he was a Jew? That seemed only too obvious. But they'd decided he wasn't, or at least decided they couldn't show he was. There was an improvement in the way things worked. When Kurt Haldweim was
Führer,
suspicion alone would have earned him a trip to the shower.

He got to his desk late. Analysts and secretaries—and
Wehrmacht
officers, too—kept stopping him in the corridor to shake his hand and tell him they were glad to see him. He was slightly dazed by the time he finally did walk up to the familiar battleship-gray metal desk. He hadn't realized so many people cared.