In the Presence of Mine Enemies (65 page)

How long had the silence stretched? Long enough for Konrad Lutze to say, “Hello? Are you still there?”

“I'm here,” she answered. “You…startled me, that's all.”

“What do you say?” he asked. “We would have things to talk about, anyhow. That is not so bad—do you know what I mean? If I go out with someone I just happened to meet, and she says, ‘So, what do you do?' and I answer, ‘I am a professor of medieval English at Friedrich Wilhelm University,' where do I go from there? Her eyes glaze over. I
have never yet met a nurse or a librarian or a salesgirl who gave a damn about
Piers Plowman
or
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
.”

“I believe that.” Giggling would have been rude, no matter how much Susanna wanted to. Being a Jew made her feel so alone in the world, it had hardly occurred to her that being a professor of medieval English literature could do the same thing. She did believe Konrad Lutze. Not many ordinary people would care about
Piers Plowman
.

“Will you, then?” Now he seemed almost pathetically eager.

Will I, then?
Susanna asked herself. Every so often, Jews did fall in love with gentiles. Most of them stopped being Jews almost as completely as if the blackshirts had carted them away. Dinner and a film weren't falling in love, not by themselves. But, by the way Lutze talked, he hoped that was how things would work out. And Susanna wasn't interested in anything that didn't have a good chance of turning serious.

So…would she, then? Could she even imagine being serious about a gentile? (Whether she could imagine being serious about Konrad Lutze seemed an altogether different, and much smaller, question.)

“I—I'm sorry, Konrad,” she heard herself say. “I'm afraid I've got other plans that evening.”

“I see,” he said heavily. “Well, I'm sorry I've taken up your time. I hope I wasn't too much of a bother. Good night.” He hung up.

So did Susanna. Part of her felt as if she'd passed a test, maybe the hardest one she'd ever face. The rest…She filled her glass with Glenfiddich and poured it down the hatch as if it were so much rotgut. Then, two or three minutes later, she did it again.

Her head started to spin. She didn't care. Tonight, she would have been good company for the drunk she'd dumped. She'd feel like hell tomorrow. That was all right. She felt like hell right now, too.

 

Admiral Yamamoto's again. A big plate of Berlin rolls, herring and onion and seaweed and rice. Wasabi to heat them
up. Wheat beer to wash them down. Imperfectly Japanese. Perfectly good.

The place was jammed, as usual. Heinrich and Willi sat at a tiny table wedged up against the wall. Bureaucrats and soldiers. SS men and Party
Bonzen
. Businessmen and tourists. Secretaries and shopgirls. A radio going in the background. Nobody paying any attention to it. Nobody able to pay any attention to it, because you couldn't hear anything but the din of people chattering.

After a bite of his shrimp tempura, Willi said, “Beats the hell out of what they were feeding you a little while ago, doesn't it?”

Heinrich eyed him. Try as he would, he couldn't find any irony. Reluctantly, fighting hard not to believe it, he decided Willi meant that as a simple comment, not as any sort of jab or gibe. Anyone else would have, anyone else at all. Heinrich nodded. “I thought of that the last time we were here. You might say so. Yes, you just might.”

An SS
Hauptsturmführer
a couple of tables over laughed uproariously at something one of his underlings had said. He waved a seidel in the air for a refill. Willi raised an eyebrow. “Noisy bastard. Even for this joint, he's a noisy bastard.”

“Ja.”
Heinrich eyed the fellow. He'd seen him before. Even more to the point, he'd heard him before, right here. “Last time we were in this place at the same time as he was, he was pitching a fit about the first edition. I wonder what he thinks with the election just a few days away.”

“Is it that same captain?” Willi tried not to be too obvious looking him over. “By God, I do believe you're right. All those SS
Schweinehunde
look the same to me.” He said that very quietly. He might despise blackshirts, but he didn't want them knowing he did. Everyone who wasn't in it despised the SS. Hardly anybody dared to come right out and say so where anyone but trusted friends could hear.

Am I still Willi's trusted friend?
Heinrich wondered.
When it comes to Lothar Prützmann's boys, I suppose I am—they threw me in the jug, after all. When it comes to Erika…
When it came to Erika, if he never set eyes on her again, that would suit him down to the ground.

The
Hauptsturmführer
poured down his fresh mug of beer. One of the noncoms with him said something Heinrich couldn't make out. The officer nodded. Putting on a comic-opera Japanese accent, he said, “They want an erection, ret them go to a borderro!” He made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down, and howled laughter right afterwards. His henchmen thought it was pretty funny, too.

“Charming people,” Willi muttered—again, so softly only Heinrich could hear.

“Aren't they?” Heinrich agreed. “Shows they're good and serious about moving the
Führer
's reforms ahead, too.”

Neither his words nor Willi's seemed disrespectful to the SS. If anyone was secretly recording their conversation, he would have a hard time proving sardonic intent—unless he also recorded the
Hauptsturmführer
's joke. Even then, he might think they approved of what the officer had said. Saying one thing and meaning another was an art people learned young in the Greater German
Reich
.

Not that SS men had to worry about such things. Of course, much of what they said amounted to,
I'm going to punch you in the nose, and you can't do a thing about it
. When that was the message, subtlety lost its point.

A pair of
Wehrmacht
officers got to their feet and stalked out. The looks they sent the
Hauptsturmführer
would have melted titanium. But not even they had the nerve to confront him directly.

He noticed. He laughed. He said something to the other SS men at the table with him. To Heinrich, they sounded like carrion crows cawing over the body of something that would soon be dead. Their black uniforms only emphasized the resemblance. And what sort of untimely demise would the blackshirts anticipate with so much glee? Only one thing occurred to Heinrich: the death of reform, the death of the chance to speak your mind, the death of the chance to remember the past as it really was, the death of the chance not to make the same mistake again.

He shivered, though it was a warm spring day and the crowded restaurant fairly radiated heat. He gulped what
was left of his beer almost as fast as the
Hauptsturmführer
had drained his. Then he took out his wallet and laid down enough money to cover the bill. “Come on,” he told Willi. “Let's get out of here.”

Willi hadn't quite finished lunch. He started to say something—probably something pungent. But whatever he saw in Heinrich's face made him change his mind. “Give me half a minute,” was as much protest as he offered. He devoured his last tempura shrimp in hardly more time than he'd promised. Still chewing, he got to his feet. “All right. I'm ready.”

“Thanks,” Heinrich said once they were out on the sidewalk.

“Don't worry about it.” With an expansive wave, Willi brushed aside gratitude.

They walked toward the bus stop. After a few strides, Heinrich asked, “Why didn't you argue with me more?”

“Are you kidding?” Willi said. “You looked like a goose walked over your grave. You were going to get the hell out of there regardless of whether I came along. So I figured I might as well come.” He made things sound simple. He usually did—whether they were or not.

“Thanks,” Heinrich said again. After another few paces, he added, “It wasn't a goose—but you're close enough.”

 

“Come on, Heinrich!” Lise said. “Do you want to be late for work?” She looked toward the stairway. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane should have come down for their breakfast. They hadn't, not yet. Lise threw her hands in the air. “Does everybody want to be late this morning?”

“I'm going, I'm going,” her husband said. He put down his coffee cup, gave her a quick, caffeinated kiss, grabbed his attaché case, and hurried out the front door, calling, “Good-bye, girls!” as he went.

Only silence from the second floor. Two minutes later, though…Lise decided that couldn't possibly be a herd of buffalo on the stairs, which meant it had to be her daughters. They swarmed into the kitchen. By the way they ate, she hadn't fed them for six or eight weeks. Eggs, bacon, sweet rolls—where were they putting it all?

“I ought to make you take off your shoes and see if you're hiding breakfast in there,” Lise said. The girls made faces at her. The time they'd spent in that foundlings' home didn't seem to have done them any harm. Francesca and Roxane were still sure they'd gone there by mistake. Alicia knew better, even if she couldn't say so while her sisters were around. But even she was young enough to have a lot more resilience than most grownups would have. And she was young enough for death not to seem altogether real to her, which also helped.

Lise wished she could say the same. She'd died ten thousand times before her husband and children came home.

Then Roxane raced up the stairs with a wail of dismay: “I forgot to do my arithmetic homework!”

Unlike her sisters, she did such things every once in a while. This time, at least, she remembered she'd forgotten. “Work fast!” Lise called. “You still have to catch the bus.”

“We could go on, Mommy,” Francesca said.

“No, wait for your sister. You've got time.” Lise looked at the clock on the range. “I hope you've got time. She'd better not take too long.” Another glance at the clock. Why couldn't mornings ever run smoothly?
Because then they wouldn't be mornings, that's why
.

“She could do some of her homework
on
the bus,” Alicia suggested.

“Let her do as much as she can upstairs,” Lise said. Roxane liked to chat with friends when she rode to and from school. She was always talking about how they said this to that, or that about this. Once she was out of the house, even the threat of getting in trouble might not hold her to doing what she needed to do. “
Hurry up, Roxane!
”

“
I'm hurrying!
” That was a frantic screech.

Just when Lise was about to go upstairs and get her littlest daughter, Roxane came pounding down. “All right. I'm done.” She was all smiles again.

“For heaven's sake, try to remember to do your homework when you're supposed to,” Lise said. Roxane nodded solemnly. She'd be good now—till the next time she wasn't. Then they would go through this again.
Well, so what?
Lise
thought.
Next to getting arrested and killed, forgotten arithmetic isn't so much of a much, now is it?

Kisses all around. If Lise's were more heartfelt than they had been before the girls got taken away—well, then they were, that was all. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane probably didn't even notice. Good-byes. Out the door the girls went. There was Emma Handrick, just coming out of her house up the street. If she wasn't late, they weren't, either. And she wasn't. So they weren't.

Lise closed the door. Sudden quiet inside the house. Not just quiet—peace. Time seemed to slow down after the frantic jangling of getting her family off to work and school. Now she could fix herself another cup of coffee, sit back, and listen to music for a little while. She could, and she would. After half an hour or so, her own batteries recharged, she could get on with the things she had to do today.

Plenty of cream and plenty of sugar in the coffee, a Strauss waltz coming from the radio, a couple of song thrushes and a blackbird hopping in the back yard hunting for worms…It wasn't bad. It would have been better if she hadn't gone through terror not long before, but it wasn't bad.

And then the waltz disappeared. It hadn't ended; it just stopped, halfway through. Close to a minute of dead air followed.
Somebody's going to catch it,
Lise thought. Foulups like that didn't happen very often.

Music began again. But this still wasn't the vanished waltz. It was “
Deutschland über Alles
.” The “Horst Wessel Song” came hard on its heels. Lise's brief sense of peace had shattered well before she heard the second national anthem. There hadn't been a mistake at the radio station. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong, somewhere in the wider world.

The “Horst Wessel Song” ended. After another stretch of silence, a man's voice came on the air: “The following important statement comes to you from the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German
Reich
.”