HEINRICH AND LISE GIMPEL WERE DEFENDING AGAINST A small slam in spades, doubled, that Willi Dorsch was playing. Heinrich was the one who'd doubled. With the ace of hearts in his hand, why not? One more trick after that, he thought, ought to come from somewhere. That ace had been his opening lead-whereupon he'd discovered, painfully, that Erika had a void in hearts. Willi had grinned like the Cheshire Cat when he trumped the beautiful, lost ace.
One trick for the defenders had materialized, when the clubs split evenly and Heinrich's queen survived. He couldn't see where they would come up with a second one, the one that would set the contract. His two meager trumps were gone, pulled, and Lise had had only one.
Willi led the queen of diamonds. Heinrich glumly tossed out the seven. The ace lay face-up on the table in the dummy's hand. Willi confidently didn't play it, instead choosing the three. Lise didn't even smile as she ruined the finesse by laying her king on top of the queen. "Down one," she said sweetly.
"Oh, for God's sake!" Willi said. He might have added something more pungent than that, but the three Gimpel girls had gone to bed only a few minutes before and could have heard if he did. He sent Heinrich an accusing stare. "You were the one who doubled. I was sure you had that…miserable king."
"I doubled on the strength of the ace," Heinrich said. "When you ruffed it, I thought we were doomed. Let's finish the hand-maybe we'll come up with another trick, too."
Lise led. Willi handily took the rest of the tricks, but he and Erika still went down one. His wife sighed mournfully.
"I would have played that one the same way." Heinrich came to Willi's defense.
"Would you?" Erika didn't sound as if she believed it.
"Sure I would," he said. "Lise didn't bid at all during the auction. You have to figure what strength we've got is in my hand."
"Maybe." Erika still seemed dubious-and annoyed at her husband. "Ifyou'd tried that finesse, Heinrich, it probably would have worked."
Willi Dorsch didn't say anything. He did turn red, though, as he gathered up the cards. Heinrich tried to defuse things, saying, "Ha! Don't I wish? I've had more finesses go down in flames than the Russians lost planes the first day we hit them."
"But you don't run them unless you need to," Erika said. "Willi tried that one for the sake of being cute. We could have made without it."
She spoke as if her husband weren't there. Willi noticed, too, and turned redder than ever. "We were in trouble if Ididn't try that finesse," he insisted.
"I don't think so," Erika said.
"Whose deal is it?" Lise asked. That might not have been the wisdom of Solomon, but it sufficed to forestall the argument. The next hand was unexciting; the Gimpels bid two hearts and made three. The hand after that, Erika Dorsch made four spades and chopped off the Gimpels' leg.
She didn't say anything to Willi. She made such a point of not saying anything to him, he turned red all over again. "Yes, you're a genius," he growled. "There. I admit it. Are you happy now?"
"I just played it sensibly," Erika said. "It's not that you haven't got brains, sweetheart. It's just that you don't always bother using them. If you ask me, that's worse, because you could." Things would have been bad enough if she'd left it there, but she added, "Heinrich, now, he gets the most from what he's got between his ears."
Lise Gimpel sent her husband a hooded look. He didn't need it to know this was several different flavors of trouble. The most immediate one was between Willi and Erika. Willi took a deep breath. By the nasty glint in his eyes, Heinrich knew with sudden, appalled certainty just what he was going to say. It would have been crude in a locker room. At the bridge table, it would have been a disaster. Heinrich got there first, saying, "If I'm as smart as all that, why aren't I rich? If I'm as smart as all that, why wasn't I smart enough to pick a better-looking face, too?"
He hoped that would help calm Willi, who was by anybody's standards better-looking than he was. And it might have, if Erika hadn't poured gasoline on the fire: "Some things, we can't choose. Some things…we can." She was looking straight at her husband.
Willi had managed to get some grip on his temper. His voice was thick with anger when he said, "We'll talk about this later," but at least he seemed willing to talk about it later instead of having a row right there on the spot.
"Why don't I bring out the coffee and cake?" Lise said. "I think maybe we've had enough bridge for the night."
Heinrich hoped Erika would hop up and help, but she didn't. She was, he slowly realized, as angry at Willi as he was at her. She might have realized what her husband had almost said, too-or maybe she was angry for reasons that had nothing to do with bridge but came out over the game. Sitting there with them, waiting for Lise to come back, Heinrich felt like a man in the middle of a minefield.
When the minefield went up, though, it went up from an unexpected direction. Erika Dorsch turned her blue gaze on him and asked, "What do you think of the whole business about the first edition of Mein Kampf?"
Few residents of the Reich would have been comfortable answering that question. It horrified Heinrich for all sorts of reasons, most of which Erika knew nothing about. He tried to pass it off lightly: "What I think doesn't matter. What the powers that be think will be what counts."
"It's what I told Heinrich at the office: that whole business is nothing but a lot of garbage," Willi said. "Nobody who counts will pay any attention to it."
The blue glare Erika turned on him might have come from twin acetylene torches. "I already know what you think. I ought to-I've heard it often enough. I'm trying to find out what Heinrich thinks."
Wherever that anger came from, it was genuine. Heinrich wondered whether Erika really had her sights set on him, or whether she was only using him to make Willi angry and jealous. Either way, it worked. Willi visibly steamed. Heinrich said, "Like I told you, I don't know what to think. How about you, Erika?" He regretted the last question as soon as the words were out of his mouth, which was, of course, too late.
"Me? I think it's about time somebody brought this up," she said. "Who is the Reich for, if it's not for the people in it? And if it's for us, shouldn't we have some say about who runs it?"
Heinrich agreed with that, to the extent that he could. He would never have dared to say it out loud, though. Willi Dorsch sneered. "My wife, the democrat. This iswhy Hitler changed things after the first edition. Look what that kind of nonsense got the French. Look what it got the Americans. If you go around electing politicians, they'll kiss the backsides of the people who voted them in. You need men who canlead, not follow."
At long last, Lise brought in the cakes and coffee. She set plate and cup in front of Willi. "Here. Why don't you lead off on this?"
"Thanks, Lise," Willi said as he cut himself a slice of cake. "I don't hear you going on about how wonderful the stupid first edition is. You've got the sense to know it's rubbish."
His wife said, "I'm with Heinrich. I can't do anything much about it one way or the other. What's the point of fussing over something like that?"
"Thereis a point," Erika Dorsch insisted. "If the Party Bonzen know the people are looking over their shoulder and just waiting to throw them out if they do something stupid or feather their own nests, maybe they'll watch themselves."
Heinrich had the same hope. Wouldn't leaders responsible to the people they ruled be milder than leaders responsible to no one but their courtiers? They could hardly be harsher. No matter what he hoped, though, he'd had keeping quiet and staying noncommittal inalterably drummed into him. Silence meant more than security. Silence meant survival.
And that held true for others besides the last few hidden Jews, as Willi pointed out: "When all this is over, when we've got ourselves a new Fuhrer, the Security Police are going to take a good, long look at everybody who babbled about the first edition and how wonderful it is. They may figure some people are just fools, and let them off the hook. But some people, the agitators, will win themselves noodles for their big mouths." The camp slang for a bullet in the back of the neck had become part of the ordinary German language.
All he succeeded in doing was getting his wife angry again. "So what shall we do, then?" Erika snapped. "Sit on our hands and keep quiet because we're afraid? Pretend we're nothing but a bunch of Mussulmen?" That was camp slang, too, slang for prisoners who'd given up and were waiting to die.
Her question prompted only one answer from Heinrich.Yes, he thought.What else is there? Don't you realize what you're up against?
Maybe Erika didn't. She'd lived a life of comfort and privilege, confident she was one of the Herrenvolk. So had most Germans in the forty years since the United States went down. They were top dogs, and seldom had to think about how they stayed on top.
Sure enough, Erika stuck out her chin and said, "I'm just as good an Aryan as any of the Party big shots.
I'm just as good an Aryan as Kurt Haldweim was-and so are you, Willi, and Heinrich and Lise, if you'd just stand up on your hind legs about it." Could sheer Aryan arrogance pave the way for the measures the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined? There was a notion that hadn't occurred to Heinrich up till now.We're all set about everyone else, so we must be equal to one another. It made a very Germanic kind of sense. But just because Erika thought it was true, would anyone else? That was liable to be a different story.
Willi said, "I think we'd better head for home. Some nights there's just no reasoning with some people."
Though he did his best to sound cheerful, Heinrich thought he was fuming underneath. Erika didn't help when she said, "I've been telling you that for years, and you never paid any attention to me."
They were still sniping at each other when they left the Gimpel house and headed up the street toward the bus stop. Heinrich closed the door behind them. "Whew!" he said-a long whoosh of air. "Yes." Lise stretched the word to three times its usual length. "That was a fascinating evening, wasn't it?"
"There's a good word for it." Heinrich could imagine several other words he might have used. Fascinating was the safest one he could come up with. "I don't think you're part of the problem between Willi and Erika," his wife said.
"That's good," he answered, most sincerely. "I don't think you're part of the problem," Lise repeated, "but I think Erika thinks you're part of the solution."
"You…may be right." Heinrich didn't want to admit even that much. It felt dangerous: not dangerous in the hauled-off-to-an-extermination-camp sense, but dangerous in the simpler, more normal, this-complicates-my-life sense. He was not the sort of man who cared for danger of any sort.
Lise tapped her foot on the tile of the entry hall. "And if I am right, what are you going to do about it?"
"Me? Nothing!" he exclaimed. The alarm in his voice must have got through to her, because she relaxed-a little. "Good," she said.
"That's the right answer." She paused pensively. "Erika's a very good-looking woman, isn't she?" Heinrich couldn't even say no. She would have known he was lying. "I suppose so," he mumbled.
"Maybe it's not such a bad thing you have more on your mind than most husbands." Lise tried to eye him severely, but a smile curled up the corners of her mouth in spite of herself. The same thing had occurred to Heinrich not so long before. He was not about to admit that to Lise. He told himself Security Police torturers couldn't have torn it from him, but he knew he was liable to be wrong. Those people were very good at what they did, and got a lot of practice doing it. He realized he had to say something. He couldn't just keep standing there. Otherwise, Lise was liable to think he thought it was too bad he had more on his mind than most husbands, which was the last thing he wanted. "I know when I'm well off," he told her.
That turned the tentative, reluctant smile wide and happy. "Good," she said. "You'd better." She paused. "Do you know when you're well off well enough to help me clean up?"
"I suppose so," he said once more, as halfheartedly as he had when admitting Erika Dorsch was pretty.
Lise sent him a sharp look. Then she figured out why he'd sounded the way he had. She made as if to throw something at him. "It's a good thing I've known you for a long time," she said.
"Yes, I think so, too," Heinrich said, and that, for once, turned out to be just the right answer.
Esther Stutzman turned the key to get into Dr. Dambach's outer office. "Good morning,Frau Stutzman," the pediatrician called from his inner sanctum.
"Good morning, Doctor," she answered. "Have you been here long?"
"A while," Dambach said. "Would you please see to the coffeemaker? It's turning out nothing but sludge."
"Of course." When Esther did, she discovered he'd put three times as much coffee on the filter as he should have. She didn't point that out to him; experience had taught her that pointing such things out did no good. With children, he knew what he was doing. With the coffeemaker…no. She just set things to rights and brought him a proper cup of coffee.
"Danke schon,"he said. "I don't know what goes wrong when I put my hands on that machine, but something always does. I can't understand it. I follow the instructions…"
"Yes, Doctor," Esther replied. From what Irma, the afternoon receptionist, said, she wasn't the only one who'd given up arguing with Dambach about the coffeemaker.
He sipped from the cup Esther had brought him. "This is much better," he told her. "I don't know how you make that miserable thing behave, but you always manage to." Esther only smiled. If the pediatrician wanted to think she was a genius when it came to coffee, she wouldn't complain. He tapped at the papers on his desk. "I've found something interesting-something peculiar, even."
Was he trying to show that he was good for something even if he couldn't make coffee worth a damn? Esther already knew that. She also knew she had to ask, "What is it, Dr. Dambach?" and sound interested when she did.
And then, all of a sudden, shewas interested, vitally and painfully interested, for he said, "Do you remember the case of Paul Klein a few days ago?"
"The poor baby with that horrible disease?" Esther said, doing her best not to think,The poor baby who's a Jew.
"Yes, that's right. I have found a fascinating discrepancy on his parents' genealogical records."
Dear God! Did Walther make a mistake?None of the fear Esther felt showed on her face. If she'd shown fear whenever she felt it, she would have gone around looking panic-stricken all the time. When she said, "Really?" she sounded intrigued, but no more than a good secretary should have.
Dr. Dambach nodded. "I don't know what to make of it, either," he said. "In the records I got from the Reichs Genealogical Office, both Richard and Maria Klein are shown to have distant ancestors who may possibly have been…well, Jews."
"Good heavens!" Esther had had a lot of practice simulating that kind of shock.
"As I say, these were distant ancestors," Dambach went on hastily. "Nothing to involve the Security Police, believe me. I don't care for that business any more than you do."I doubt that, Esther thought.I doubt that very much. The pediatrician, fortunately oblivious, continued. "But the slight Jewish taint would help account for the presence of the Tay-Sachs gene on both sides of the family."
"I see," Esther said. What she didn't see was where the problem lay in that case.
Dambach proceeded to spell it out for her: "While I was going through the Kleins' records, I happened to come across another copy of their family tree, one they'd given me when Paul's older brother, Eduard, was born.Those pedigrees show unquestioned Aryan ancestry on both sides of the family, as far back as can be traced."
"How…very strange," Esther said through lips suddenly stiff with dread. Changing a computer record threw any future hounds off the scent, yes. But compare the change to a printout from before it was made…I should have pulled those records from Eduard's chart,Esther thought. But it had never crossed her mind. Eduard had been born before she came to work at Dambach's office, and she'd forgotten about his files. Guilt made her want to sink through the floor.
"Strange indeed. I've never seen another case like it," Dr. Dambach said. "And what's even stranger is, I called the Reichs Genealogical Office yesterday afternoon, and they said their records show no signs of tampering."
Thank heaven for that,Esther thought.Walther's safe. But were Richard and Maria Klein? "Maybe…I hate to say this of people, but maybe they tried to hide their Jews in the woodpile, and used altered documents to do it," Esther suggested, doing her best for them. "Even if you're not enough of a Mischling to be disposed of, a lot of folks don't care to have anything to do with you if you've got even a trace of Jew blood."
"Altering official documents is illegal," Dambach said severely. But then he paused, a thoughtful expression on his round face. "Still, I suppose it could be. It makes more sense than anything I thought of. I would have hoped, though, that the Kleins might have trusted their children's physician. I am, after all, a man with some experience of the world. I know that a small taint of Jewish ancestry may be forgiven. It's not as if they were half breeds or full bloods, for heaven's sake-as if there were such folk at the heart of the Reich in this day and age."
"Of course not, Doctor. What a ridiculous idea." Esther Stutzman clamped down hard on a scream. Dr. Dambach thought of himself as a man of the world, but he thought-he'd been trained to think-of Jews as different from other people. He thought of himself as tolerant for being willing to ignore some distant trace of Jewish ancestry. And so, for the Greater German Reich, he was…
The pediatrician arranged papers in a neat stack. "As I say, I am a man with some experience of the world. I have seen forged genealogical papers before. You would be surprised how many people want to claim a grander ancestry than they really own. Most of them are crude jobs, though-altered photocopies and such. But what the Kleins gave me with Eduard seems perfectly authentic."
That's because itisperfectly authentic, at least as far as the Reichs Genealogical Office knows. "As long as you have the proper information now, is there really any point to making a fuss?" Esther said. If Dambach said no, she could go out to her receptionist's station and breathe a sigh of relief when he wasn't looking.
But Dambach didn't say anything at all. He just sat there eyeing the different sets of genealogical records. Esther knew she'd pushed things as far as she could. If she said another word, her boss would start wondering why she was sticking up for the Kleins so much.Don't let anyone start wondering about you might have been the eleventh commandment for Jews in the Reich. A smile on her face, she walked out of Dr. Dambach's private office.
She had plenty with which to busy herself out front: filing, billing, preparing dunning letters for people whose payments were late. She bit her lip when the pediatrician used the telephone, even though she couldn't make out whom he was calling.His wife, his brother, his mother, she thought hopefully.
The telephone she was in charge of-not Dambach's personal line-began to ring, too. Patients and their parents-mostly their mothers-started coming in. She scheduled appointments and led children and the grownups with them back to examination rooms. Once, she made a followup appointment with a specialist for a boy whose broken arm wasn't healing as straight as Dambach would have liked.
As noon approached, the flood of people coming in slowed down and the flood of people going out picked up. Dr. Dambach sometimes worked straight through lunch, but this didn't look like a day where he would have to. Esther relaxed a little. She got the chance to look around for things she could take care of before she went home. That way, Irma wouldn't have to worry about them this afternoon, and Esther herself wouldn't have to worry about them tomorrow morning.
The last patient had just left when the door to the waiting room opened again. Esther looked up in annoyance-was someone trying to bring in a child without first making an appointment? Unless it was an emergency, she intended to send anyone that foolish away with a flea in his ear.
But the tall man in the unfamiliar dark brown uniform was not carrying a baby or holding a child by the hand. He nodded to her. "This is the office of Dr. Martin Dambach?" he inquired, his accent Bavarian.
"Yes, that's right," Esther answered. "And you are…?"
"Maximilian Ebert,Reichs Genealogical Office, at your service." He actually clicked his heels. Esther tried to remember the last time she'd seen anyone outside of the cinema do that-tried and failed. The man from the Genealogical Office went on, "Dr. Dambach is in?"
Esther wanted to tell him no. Had she thought that would make him go away and never come back, she would have. As things were, she had to hide alarm and reluctance when she nodded. "Yes, he is. One moment, please." She went back to Dr. Dambach's office. The pediatrician was eating a liverwurst sandwich. "Excuse me, Doctor, but a Herr Ebert from the Reichs Genealogical Office is here to see you."
"Is he?" Dr. Dambach said with his mouth full. He swallowed heroically; Esther thought of an anaconda engulfing a tapir. When Dambach spoke again, his voice was clear: "I didn't expect him so soon. Please tell him he can come in." He stuck the remains of the sandwich in a desk drawer.
"Danke schon, gnadige Frau," Ebert said when Esther delivered the message, and he clicked his heels again.Dear lady? Esther wondered. That took politeness a long way when talking to a receptionist. Did he like her looks? It wasn't mutual. He was dark and jowly, and she thought he'd have a nasty temper if he weren't trying to be charming. She was careful to stand well away from him when she led him to the doctor's private office.
They didn't bother closing the door. Esther heard bits of conversation floating out: "…obviously genuine…" "…alsoobviously genuine…" "…don't know what to make of…" "…wouldn't bother but for the Jewish aspect…" "…a puzzlement, without a doubt…"
After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Dambach and Maximilian Ebert emerged together. The man from the Genealogical Office asked Esther, "What do you know of this business about the Kleins?"
"Should we be talking about this with her?" Dambach asked.
"I don't see why not," Ebert said. "She's obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. Well,Frau "-his eye picked up the little name badge at her station-"ah,Frau Stutzman?"
"Only what Dr. Dambach has told me," Esther answered.Obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. She couldn't shriek laughter, however much she might want to. Cautiously, she went on, "I do know the Kleins a little away from the office." If she didn't say that, they could find out. Better to admit it. "They've always seemed like good enough people. I'm sorry their child has this horrible disease." Every word of that was true-more true than Maximilian Ebert could know.
"Have you any idea how they could have got two different sets of genealogical records, each one plainly authentic?" Ebert asked.
"No. I don't see how it's possible," she answered, which was anything but the truth.
"Are you really sure theyare both authentic?" Dr. Dambach asked.
"As certain as I can be without the laboratory work to prove it," Ebert said. "I'll take both of them with me to get that. And then, if they do both turn out to be genuine, we'll have to figure out what that means. At the moment, Doctor, I have no more idea than you do. And now I must be off. A pleasure to meet you,Frau Stutzman.Guten Tag." He touched the brim of his cap and strode out of the office.
"Now we'll get to the bottom of this." Dr. Dambach sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.
"So we will." Esther hoped she sounded the same way, even if it was another lie. No-especially if it was another lie.
The Medieval English Association meeting was winding down. In another couple of days, Susanna Weiss would have to fly back to Berlin. The conference hadn't been the most exciting she'd ever attended. She was bringing home material for at least two articles. That would keep Professor Oppenhoff happy. But there hadn't been any really spectacular papers and there hadn't been any really juicy scandals. Without the one or the other, the conclave itself would go down as less than memorable.
Still, there were compensations. First and foremost, there was London itself. Along with her ideas for articles, Susanna was also bringing home enough new books-used books, actually-to make excess baggage charges all but certain. Her campaign against the bookstores of London would have made General Guderian sit up and take notes. She always shopped as if she were a big-game hunter organizing a safari. All she lacked were beaters to drive the books off the shelves and into the range of her high-powered account card. She had to find the volumes and pick them out herself-but that was part of the sport.
Along with the books, she was bringing back several pairs of shoes. She'd gone after them with the same effective bravado she'd used on her bookstore campaign. She was particularly proud of one pair, which were covered all over with multicolored sequins. If she wore them to a faculty meeting, she might give the department chairman heart failure-and if that wasn't worth trying, she didn't know what would be.
She had one more reason for hating to leave London, too: no matter how stodgy the MEA had been this year, the British Union of Fascists across the street had more than made up for it. Susanna thought she might have spent more time at the Crown than she had at the Silver Eagle. She'd got to know several BUF men who thought she was a delegate totheir gathering: not the sort of compliment she most wanted, perhaps, but a compliment all the same.
"'Ere's the little lydy!" they would roar when they spotted her, and other endearments in dialects never heard among the scholars of medieval English. They pressed buttons and badges and stickers on her, and bought her pints till her back teeth floated. She would rather have had Scotch, but the rank-and-file fascists were a beer-drinking crowd.
They were also a crowd overwhelmingly in favor of doing business the way the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined. "Only stands to reason, don't it, dearie?" said a bald-headed, broken-nosed bruiser named Nick, breathing beer fumes into Susanna's face. "It's the buggers 'oove already got it made 'oo don't want ordinary blokes to 'ave their say."
"That certainly seems reasonable to me," Susanna said. Her precise, well-educated tones sent Nick and his pals into gales of laughter. She couldn't help liking them. If there was any hope for changing the way things worked, it rested on their shoulders. But the way they kept laughing while they bragged of brawls and brutalities past chilled her.If they knew I was a Jew, they would laugh like that while they stomped me to death.
She forgave, or at least forgot, their hypothetical sins when they smuggled her onto the floor for the climactic session of their assembly. They didn't think of it as smuggling, of course, and she wore enough BUF ornaments that no one, not her companions and not the even nastier thugs at the doors, even noticed that a membership badge was not among the gewgaws.
Things were undoubtedly livelier here than they were at the Medieval English Association meeting. People roared out songs in raucous choruses. The tunes came from British popular music. Some of the words were fierce, some were funny, some were obscene. Most were either for or against the first edition. Here and there, people for the older rules brawled with people opposing them. BUF guards tried without too much luck to keep the two sides apart.
A beer bottle smashed on the floor a couple of meters from Susanna's feet. "Someone will get killed!" she exclaimed.
"Some of these bastards deserve killing," Nick answered.
The brute simplicity of fascism had always fascinated and repelled Susanna at the same time. Somebody doesn't like the way you're going? Get rid of him, and then keep on going that way anyhow. If you're strong enough, you can, and it proves you were right all along.
There was, of course, a certain problem… "Suppose they decide you are the ones who need killing?" Susanna asked.
"Only goes to show they're a pack of bloody sods, eh?" Nick said.
One of the ruffian's pals, though, saw what Susanna was driving at. "If they let counting 'ands stand for banging 'eads, I expect we will, too," he said. "That's what this business is about, right?" Susanna nodded. After a moment, reluctantly, so did Nick.
Another bottle shattered, this time on somebody's head. Friends led the bleeding man out of the hall. Susanna shivered, feeling as if she'd been swept back through time. This was how the Nazis had started ninety years earlier: gathering in taverns for what were as much brawls as meetings. No Communists would come to try to break up this conclave, though. Another shiver. If any Communists were left alive, they were as much in hiding as the Reich 's handful of Jews.
Bang! Bang! Bang!To her relief, that wasn't gunfire. It was the chairman plying his gavel in front of the microphone on the podium. "That will be enough of that," Charlie Lynton called, his amplified voice booming through the hall.Bang! Bang! Bang! "Settle down!" Lynton was in his mid-fifties, with an upper-class English accent that belied his birth in Edinburgh. He was smooth and smart. He had to be smart; he'd headed the British Union of Fascists since the mid-nineties, and steered as independent a line as he could without rousing German wrath.
"Which way will he go, do you think?" Susanna asked.
"Oh, 'e's with us," Nick said, and the men around him nodded. "'E can win a show of 'ands, and 'e knows it."
His friends' heads bobbed up and down. One of them, a fellow everybody called Blinky Bill because of his squint, said, "It's them other old fools on the platform we've got to worry about."
Sure enough, a good many of the uniformed men up there looked as if they'd been chewing lemons. Things had run the same way for almost seventy years, ever since Britain fell to the Wehrmacht. As old guards will, the old guard here had expected them to keep on running the same way forever. But whatever else Charlie Lynton was, he was a breath of fresh air in a party that hadn't seen much for a long time.
He plied the gavel again.Bang! Bang! Bang! "Come on, lads, settle down," he called once more. "Let's have some order here." No call could have been better calculated to appeal to fascists. Putting things in order-their notion of order-was fascists'raison d'etre.
But even that precious call didn't work here. At the same time as Nick was bellowing, "Huzzah for the first edition!" another fascist with an even more impressive set of lungs roared, "To hell with the bloody first edition!" Chaos broke out anew.
Bang! Bang! Bang!Lynton pounded so hard, he might have used a gun if he'd had one. "Enough!" he shouted, and he had the microphone working for him. By the way the word resounded through the hall, that might have been God shouting up there-on the assumption, which Susanna found unlikely, that God took an interest in the internal squabbles of the British Union of Fascists.
"First edition! First edition!" This time, it was an organized chant, deep and rolling and thunderous. The British had learned their lessons well; similar shouts of,"Sieg heil!" resounded through Nazi rallies in Berlin and Munich and Nuremberg.
The first edition's foes weren't so well disciplined. They had no counterchant prepared. Shouting out their protests as individuals, they couldn't drown the cries of those who favored change.
"First edition! First edition!" Susanna shouted with her comrades-her friends, she supposed she had to call them for the moment. The endless chant was intoxicating. It beat in her brain. It beat in her blood. Back home, she had as little to do with National Socialism as she could without drawing suspicion to herself. She hadn't really appreciated the power of mass rallies. Now that she found herself in the middle of one, she understood. She felt caught up in something greater than herself. It wasn't a feeling she was used to having. She distrusted it, but oh, it was heady!
Charlie Lynton let the chant build for two or three minutes, then used the gavel once more. "Enough!" he boomed for a second time. "We've got a lot to get through, and we won't do it if we spend all our bloody time shouting at each other." He took a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his black uniform tunic. Most BUF men put Susanna in mind of brigands. A few reminded her of Army officers. Charlie Lynton somehow contrived to look like a corporate executive, epaulets notwithstanding. "I have here," he said, "a message from his Majesty, King Henry IX."
Where nothing else had, that won him silence and complete attention. Henry was like King Umberto in Italy: he had no real power, but enormous prestige. The Duce and the Italian Fascist Party didn't have to listen to Umberto, but they did if they were smart-and most of them wanted to. The same held true here for Charlie Lynton and the BUF with respect to King Henry.
"'My loyal, brave, and faithful subjects,'" Lynton read, "'I am pleased and proud that so many of you should wish to return to the earliest and, in my view, the best traditions of the party so closely affiliated with your own. Wishing you wisdom in your debate, I remain, Henry,Deo gratia King of England and Defender of the Faith.'"
Beside Susanna, Nick erupted volcanically, with a great roar of glee and delight. Susanna clapped her hands and whooped, too. Like the British Union of Fascists, King Henry had found a way to praise democracy and the National Socialists at the same time. That wasn't easy. Susanna hadn't even imagined it was possible. But they'd done it here.
And will we?she wondered wistfully.How arewe going to go about choosing the next Fuhrer?No one on the RRG or the BBC had said much about that. Deliberations were proceeding: that was as much as anybody would admit. It sounded more like a criminal case than anything else. Susanna grimaced.It probably is.
Up on the platform, someone from the old guard was inveighing against the first edition and everything it stood for. The longer he talked, the more loudly the rank and file booed and jeered and mocked him. Seeing as much, Charlie Lynton let him go on and on and on. He hurt his own cause worse than Lynton could have.
When the old man finally stumped back to his seat on the rostrum, the BUF leader smiled out at the rank and file and said, "Well, I think that tells us a good deal about where we all stand, doesn't it?"
A few stubborn souls booed and hooted at Lynton. But their outcry seemed almost lost in the big hall, for most of the foes of the first edition sat in embarrassed silence, as if ashamed to admit they agreed with the disastrous speaker and disagreed with both their chairman and their King. "That's done it, by God!" Nick boomed, and planted a beery kiss on Susanna's cheek. Part of her wanted to haul off and slap him. The rest was too excited at being here even to mind very much.
"We have a quorum," Charlie Lynton said. "Time to call the question. Shall we change our rules to give back to the members of the British Union of Fascists the powers that are rightfully theirs, as outlined in the first edition of Mein Kampf, or shall we go on as we have been for so long, with the few dictating to the many?"
One of the advantages of being chairman was that Lynton not only got to guide the debate but also to frame its terms. Had he opposed the change, he might have called it destroying tradition and giving in to mob rule. Since he didn't…
Reform passed overwhelmingly, by better than three to one. This time, Susanna kissed Nick on his bristly cheek. To her astonishment, the hard-bitten British fascist blushed a brighter red than she ever had.
"Thank you, friends," Lynton said when the tally was complete. "You've done the right thing, and you've done a brave thing. And now let us hope our German colleagues may profit by our example."
Herr Kessler's forefinger shot out like a striking serpent. "Alicia Gimpel!"
Alicia leaped to her feet. She stood at stiff attention. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"
"What is the principle upon which the National Socialist Party and all fascist parties are founded?"
"the Fuhrerprinzip, Herr Kessler," Alicia answered. "The principle that the leader of the party knows best the direction in which it should go." She'd learned that the year before. She didn't forget her lessons.
"Correct," her teacher growled. "Be seated." Kessler prowled in front of the blackboard. That was the only word Alicia could find for the way he moved. He might have been a lion or a leopard hunting for something to tear to pieces. She wondered what had put him in such a dreadful temper. He glared at the class. "Does anyone have any business telling the National Socialist Party of the Greater German Reich how to run its affairs? Anyone at all?"
"No,Herr Kessler," the children chorused-that was obviously the answer he wanted.
He nodded, his face still intent and angry. "No is correct. So what should we do when the Englishmen have the nerve to tell us such things? What should we do?" A boy's hand flew up in the air. Kessler pointed at him. "Wolfgang Priller!"
The boy leaped to his feet. "Punish them,Herr Kessler!" His voice was loud and shrill.
Kessler nodded again, and scribbled in the roll book. "You have the proper German spirit, Priller," he said. "I also think this would be the best course for the Reich to take. But what wewill do…" He looked most unhappy. "Without a Fuhrer, who can say what we will do? And if we do nothing, if we allow the English to get away with their insolence, is this not a sign of weakness?"
"Ja, Herr Kessler," the class said dutifully.
"What about the first edition,Herr Kessler?" a girl asked.
"Trudi Krebs," the teacher murmured. "Do your father and mother speak of the first edition? Do they?" he asked sharply. The girl nodded. He wrote in the roll book again, then slammed the book shut with a dreadful finality. He did not answer Trudi's question.
Silence-a particular kind of silence-filled the classroom.She's in trouble, Alicia thought, and then,and her mother and father are liable to be in trouble, too. Even before she'd found out she was a Jew, her parents had taught her not to say too much to other grownups. Most children in the Germanic Empire got similar lessons. The less you showed the outside world, the safer you stayed.
But Trudi had slipped. Children sometimes did. Alicia knew that was why she couldn't tell Francesca and Roxane what they really were, why she had to go on listening to them say horrible things about Jews when they were Jews themselves, why she'd said horrible things about Jews herself till not very long before…and why she had to go on saying horrible things about Jews now, just to make sure no one ever suspected.
Herr Kessler breathed out hard through his nose. He knew what sort of silence that was, too. "The first edition of Mein Kampf, " he said heavily, "is full of Adolf Hitler's earliest thoughts about the way the National Socialist Party should work. Most of these were wonderful thoughts, marvelous thoughts.Aber naturlich -our beloved first Fuhrer was a wonderful man, a marvelous man, a brilliant man. But sometimes, when he looked back at what he had written, he found later that he had better ideas yet."
Wolfgang Priller raised his hand again. "Question,Herr Kessler!" The teacher nodded. Wolf said, "Is it like when you have us revise a theme?"
"Yes. Exactly!"Herr Kessler's smile, for once, was broad and pleased and genuine. "That is exactly what it is like. And if even Adolf Hitler saw that he could improve his work by revision, I trust you will see you can do the same."
The children nodded, Alicia among them. She was playing the chameleon again, though, for inside she sniffed scornfully. She hated revising more than anything else she did at school. It struck her as a waste of time. If you thought a little before you settled in to work, so you did it right the first time, why did you need to fiddle around with it afterwards?
"So you see," the teacher went on, "if the great and wise first Fuhrer changed Mein Kampf, as he did, the first edition must be of smaller worth than those that came later. Anyone who would argue otherwise must surely suffer from a lack of proper understanding."
When the children went out to the schoolyard to play at lunchtime, no one had anything to do with Trudi Krebs. Most of her classmates pretended she wasn't there. Some of them-mostly boys-talked about her as if she weren't there. "Boy, is she going to get it," Wolfgang Priller predicted with a certain gloomy relish. "They'll knock on her door in the middle of the night, and then…" He didn't say what would happen then, but he didn't have to. The other children shuddered in delicious horror. Everybody knew the kinds of things that happened when they knocked on your door in the middle of the night.
Trudi sat all alone on a bench, fighting back tears. Alicia wanted to go over and try to give her what comfort she could. Before finding out she was a Jew, she would have. Now she didn't dare. Being what she was made a coward of her. She hated that, hated herself for hanging back. But she didn't move. She wasn't afraid of getting in trouble herself. She'd been in trouble plenty of times. Putting her family and friends in trouble, though, was a different story. She couldn't do that. And so, biting her lip, she stayed where she was.
Alicia wondered if Trudi would even show up at school the next day. But she did, and the day after that, too, and on through the rest of the week.Herr Kessler seemed surprised. Alicia knew she was surprised. If the knock on the door in the middle of the night hadn't come…well, who could say what that meant?
Esther Stutzman liked to shop, though she didn't treat expeditions to the department store like hunting trips across the veldt the way Susanna Weiss did. For a Berliner who enjoyed seeing what there was to see and spending some money, there was only one place to go: the Kurfurstendamm. Back before the Second World War, lots of rich Jews had lived there-lived there openly, which made Esther marvel. They'd got away with it for years, too, till Kristallnacht, when the broad street turned into a glittering ocean of broken glass.
Nowadays, the Kurfurstendamm still glittered, but with multicolored neon signs and the reflections of the sun off plate-glass windows. People came from all over the Germanic Empire-and from the Empire of Japan and the South American countries as well-to part with their Reichsmarks in style.
Fashions on dummies in the plate-glass windows ranged from coquettish to outrageous, while some were both at once.Before long, Esther thought,Anna will want to wear clothes like that. Her sigh was part horror and part mere sadness at the passage of time.
Last year's turbans, she saw, were out of favor. Hats this year looked like nothing so much as the high-crowned, shiny-visored caps Party and SS bigwigs wore, decorated with brightly dyed plumes sprouting from improbable places. Esther eyed them dubiously. She didn't know if she cared to look like a Sturmbannfuhrer who'd just mugged a peacock.
She paused in front of a telephone booth. The man inside might well have come from South America. He was certainly too swarthy to live comfortably within the Greater German Reich. He hung up, came out of the booth, and tipped his fedora to Esther as he hurried into the milliner's shop.
Fumbling in her handbag, she pulled out a fifty-pfennig coin and went into the telephone booth. A man who'd started towards it turned away in disappointment. He would have to find another place from which to call, not that there weren't plenty of public telephones along the Kurfurstendamm. Esther fed the coin into the slot and dialed the number she needed. The phone rang once, twice…
"Bitte?"a woman said in Esther's ear.
"Guten Tag, Frau Klein," Esther answered. "I have an important message for you."
"I'm sorry, but I'm not inter-" Maria Klein broke off, perhaps recognizing Esther's voice. Esther hoped that was why she stopped, anyhow. After a moment, the other woman said, "Well, go ahead, as long as you've got me on the line."
She had the sense not to name names, just as Esther had had the sense not to call from her own home or from Dr. Dambach's office. If the Kleins' phone was tapped (as it might well be, after Dambach had discovered the two versions of their family tree), technicians could trace the call here-but how much would they gain if they did? Precious little, because Esther intended to leave as soon as she hung up.
"Thank you," she said now. "I just wanted to let you know that there are people who know there are two sets. Isn't that interesting?" She tried to sound bright and cheerful, as a telephone solicitor should.
"This, too?" Maria said. "This, too, on top of everything with the baby?"
"I'm afraid so." In the face of the other woman's bitterness, Esther's good cheer collapsed like a burst balloon.And it's my fault, she thought miserably.Mine-nobody else's. She didn't know how she was going to live with that.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Maria Klein demanded. "Gott im Himmel,what are we supposed to do now?"
She wasn't really asking Esther. And if she was asking God, He'd had few answers for Jews these past seventy-five years. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything," Esther whispered, and hung up. As soon as she left the booth, another woman went in. She hoped the other woman had happier business. She also hoped the other woman, and whoever used the booth afterwards, would cover up all of her own fingerprints.
Esther wanted to find another phone booth and call Walther, to let him know she'd warned the Kleins. She wanted to, but she didn't. Calls into and out of Zeiss were too likely to be monitored. She could have worked out some sort of code phrase to tell him what she'd done, but she didn't want to take the chance today. Such phrases were fine if nobody was likely to be paying close attention. If, on the other hand, someone was trying to build a case…
With a shiver, Esther shook her head. "No," she murmured.
A man gave her a curious look. Susanna would have frozen him with a glare. Heinrich would have walked past him without even noticing the curious look, which would have confounded him just as well. Esther's way was to smile sweetly at him. He turned red, embarrassed at wondering about such an obviously normal person.
If only you knew,Esther thought. But the truth, no matter how little the Nazis wanted to admit it, was that Jews were, or could be, normal people, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Shylock's words from The Merchant of Venice echoed in Esther's mind.If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
Esther tried to imagine an SS man tickling a Jew. The picture was enough to set her laughing without the deed-but only for a moment. The Nazis had poisoned Jews, poisoned them by the millions, and the Jews had died.
Shylock went on,and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? She doubted a Jew was left alive who didn't dream of revenge at least once a day. But dreams were only dreams.
Survival is a kind of revenge,Esther thought.Just by living on, by passing our heritage to our children, we beat the Nazis. She smiled. Now Alicia Gimpel knew what she was, too. Pretty soon, her sisters would also know.
And if all went well-and Esther, with her sunny disposition, still hoped it would-Eduard Klein would find out one of these days, too. But then that smile disappeared. No matter how sunny Esther was, she couldn't keep it. The Kleins had passed on some of their heritage to little Paul, too, and he would never live to find out what he was.
Heinrich Gimpel was starting to get used to seeing long black limousines pull up to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht about the time he and Willi got off their bus in front of the building. He was getting used to watching Party and SSBonzen he'd seen on the televisor and read about in newspapers and magazines climbing the steps he climbed every day.
And he was beginning to gauge how the generals in charge of the Wehrmacht liked their high-ranking visitors by the way the guards treated the newcomers at the entrance. If they came to attention and waved the politicking bigwigs through, those officials were in good odor with his bosses. If they made the muckymucks wait, checked identity cards against faces, and fed the cards through the machine reader to get a green light, those men weren't so well liked.
One morning, the machine reader showed a red light. "This is an outrage!" an SSObergruppenfuhrer shouted. "Let me pass!"
"Sorry," a guard replied, obviously enjoying being rude to the SS equivalent of a lieutenant general. "No green light, you don't come in." He turned to Heinrich and Willi. "Next!"
"You have not heard the last of this!" the Obergruppenfuhrer warned. He stormed off, his face as red as the stripe on a General Staff officer's trousers.
Heinrich wondered if his identity card would pass muster, but it did. So did Willi's. Once they got inside, Willi said, "The generals really didn't want to see that fellow, if they programmed the reader to reject his card."
"People are starting to show where they stand," Heinrich replied.
"I'd say so," Willi Dorsch agreed. "And if that SS man's faction wins, I'd say we'll see our budget cut."
Heinrich shrugged. "The Waffen -SS has always thought it could do the Wehrmacht 's job. The next time it's right will be the first."
"Not to hear its officers tell the story." Willi shrugged, too. "Ah, well. Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is but to do or die."
"You so relieve my mind," Heinrich said. Willi laughed. He could talk blithely about dying-he didn't have to worry about it very much. Heinrich, on the other hand, had days when he felt he was living on borrowed time, and that it was about to run out. The feeling would have been bad enough had he worried about himself alone. Worrying about the rest of his folk left in the Reich seemed twenty times worse.
As they sat down at their desks, Willi said, "You see, though? It's just like I said. Nobody cares what the limeys did, and nobody's calling a Party congress to pick the next Fuhrer. So much for the precious first edition. The big shots will do the choosing, same as always."
"It does look that way," Heinrich agreed, and did his best not to sound too unhappy in case the room was bugged. "They're taking their time, too."
"They've got to find somebody they can all at least stand," Willi said, which was doubtless true. "That weeds out the zanies and the men who only have a following in one faction."
"So it does." If Heinrich thought,A Party congress would do better still, because then everything would be out in the open, he kept it to himself. Willi was right: no Party congress would choose Kurt Haldweim's successor. That being so, to go on talking about the first edition might mark a man as a dangerous dissident.
He settled in to work. No matter what the Waffen -SS thought, the Wehrmacht was the strong right arm of the Greater German Reich. And no matter who became Fuhrer -even if it turned out to be that belligerent Obergruppenfuhrer 's candidate-the Wehrmacht had to go on. It had to-and it would. Plenty of people like Heinrich Gimpel (though not many of themjust like Heinrich Gimpel) made sure it kept running smoothly.
Willi asked, "Are we on for tonight?"
"The brains of the outfit hasn't told me anything different," Heinrich said, by which he meant Lise. Willi grinned; he sometimes called Erika the High Command in the same way. Carefully, Heinrich added, "We might do better if we don't talk politics too much, though."
Willi's grin slipped. "You know that, and I know that, but whether Erika knows that… Well, we'll find out."
That was what Heinrich was afraid of, but he made himself smile and nod. The date for dinner and bridge alarmed him, so that part of him wished he'd backed out. If Willi and Erika's marriage was blowing up, he didn't want it to blow up in his face. But what would Erika do if he made that too obvious? He didn't want to find out. Getting back to work was something of a relief.
Willi didn't joke any more about Erika being the one who wanted Heinrich over. Heinrich wished he would have. If he was joking about it, he probably wasn't brooding over what it meant. If he wasn't joking…Well, who could say?
They got through the day's work. Canteen rumor was full of talk about the rejected Obergruppenfuhrer. Since Heinrich and Willi had seen that happen, they scored points for eyewitness accounts. Another analyst sighed enviously, saying, "I'd've paid money to watch one of those arrogant so-and-sos head off with a flea in his ear." Several other people nodded.
Rumor also spoke of Bonzen from the Party and from the Navy who had been admitted to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Heinrich tried to read tea leaves from that. All he could see was that the Navy, like the Wehrmacht, was a conservative service. If they were joining with one section of the Party, maybe with an SS faction different from that Obergruppenfuhrer 's…They might be trying to promote a candidate, or they might be trying to block one. Only time would tell.
Heinrich and Willi rode home together. "See you a little before seven," Willi said as he got off the bus. "We can all watch Horst and then get down to cards."
"All right." Heinrich hoped it would be.
Katarina came over to babysit the girls. Kathe was a kid sister, closer in age to Alicia than to Lise. Heinrich suspected she'd been a surprise to her parents. He wished he could ask them even such a nosy question; a drunken truck driver had broadsided their little VW a few years before, and they hadn't survived the wreck. A People's Court gave the truck driver summary justice, but that didn't bring back the Franks.
Tante Kathe fascinated the children. She dyed her brown hair a yellow as artificial as oleomargarine, and sometimes wore styles that looked like what SS uniforms would have been if they were designed to titillate rather than terrify.In my day, you'd have done a stretch in a camp for clothes like that, Heinrich thought. He laughed at himself.And if going on about "In my day…" doesn't make me an old fogy, I don't know what would.
Tonight Katarina had on dungarees of blue American denim, which were almost as scandalous as some of her other clothes. She refused to be ordinary. That was dangerous for a Jew. On the other hand, a fair number of young men and women dressed the way she did, so she had a crowd into which she could blend in.
"Have fun with your bridge," she told Heinrich and Lise. She might have been saying,Have fun with your warm milk and slippers. Kathe's eyes sparkled as she turned to the girls. "While they're gone, we'll havereal fun, won't we?"
"Ja!"Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane chorused, entranced. Every so often, Heinrich wondered whatreal fun consisted of. He'd never found the girls' heads spinning with hashish after Tante Kathe watched them, so he didn't lose sleep over it, but he did wonder.
Getting out of the house felt good, even if it was only for the short jaunt over to the Dorsches'. As Heinrich and Lise got off the bus, she said, "Willi and Erika are lucky to live so close to their bus stop."
Heinrich nodded. "I've thought the same thing." Thinking along with your wife was supposed to be another mark of fogydom. He didn't care. He liked thinking along with Lise.
When he rang the bell, Erika opened the door. She smiled at the Gimpels. "Come on in," she said. "Horst will be on in a minute, and Willi wouldn't miss him for the world." Erika made watching the news sound like a vice.First danger sign, Heinrich thought.
From the front room, Willi's voice rose in excitement: "Come quick, everybody! I think we've got a new Fuhrer! " That sent Heinrich and Lise-and Erika-hurrying to join him.
"Germany, awake!" Horst Witzleben spoke in millions of homes as if he were a close friend. "After long and serious discussions, senior Party, SS, and military leaders have chosen the present minister of heavy industry, Heinz Buckliger, to guide the future of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire. I am proud to be among the first to say, 'Heil Buckliger!'" His arm shot out in the Nazi salute.
Behind him, a new picture appeared on the screen. Heinrich wouldn't have known Heinz Buckliger from the man in the moon. He proved to be a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, with a thick shock of graying blond hair and a toothy smile. "He's so young!" Erika Dorsch said. A moment later, she added, "And handsome, too."
Heinrich didn't know about handsome. Young the new Fuhrer certainly was: younger by far than Kurt Haldweim had been when he began to lead the Reich. "They passed over a lot of senior people to put him in place," Willi said. "The new generation's here at last."
"The new head of the Reich was born in Breslau in 1959," Horst Witzleben said. That made Buckliger more than forty years younger than Haldweim-closer to two generations than one. The newsreader went on, "He studied economics in Munich, graduating with highest honors from the university there. Before joining the Ministry of Heavy Industry, he served for seven years in the Allgemeine -SS, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer."Captain, Heinrich thought, automatically translating to what he thought of as a real rank. Not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad.
"Once in the Ministry,Herr Buckliger rapidly became known as an efficiency expert," Witzleben said. "He has promised to bring that passion for efficiency to the Reich as a whole. Here is his first statement after his selection."
Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the Fuhrer 's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. "Volk of the Greater German Reich, I accept the role of Fuhrer with pride, but also with great humility," he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. "Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the Reich and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed."
"He sounds all right," Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the Reich on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.
"So he does," Heinrich agreed. "But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose." His first guess for the new Fuhrer 's patron was Lothar Prutzmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.
"All right, now we know," Erika said. "After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?"
"Good idea," Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.
The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, "I wonder what's on the news."
On the next hand, Erika Dorsch made three no-trump: as quick and one-sided a rubber as possible. Lise said, "Heinrich's right. Watching the news seems better and better." Their hosts laughed at them.
They played steadily, with a couple of pauses when Erika helped the Dorsches' son and daughter with their homework and one when Willi broke up a squabble between the children. "This all looks and sounds familiar," Heinrich said.
"Life goes on," Erika said, "one way or another." If that wasn't a hooded glance she sent toward Willi, Heinrich had never seen one.
Willi himself affected not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice; you never could tell with Willi. He said, "Whose deal is it?"
"Mine, I think," Lise answered. She gather up the cards and started shuffling. "It is now, anyway."
Heinrich got the contract when everybody passed at two hearts. Playing it was routine, so much so that things got sidetracked halfway through when Lise and Willi started arguing about a newspaper story on
Babylonian archaeology that they'd both seen and Heinrich and Erika had somehow missed. Willi insisted the find proved Hammurabi's code was 250 years older than everyone had thought up till now; Lise was just as sure it proved no such thing. As people will when disagreeing about something of such monumental unimportance, they both got more and more certain they were right. As they pointed fingers at each other, they might have forgotten anyone else was in the room-or, for that matter, on the planet.
Heinrich set his cards on the table, face down. Lise hardly ever got so excited when she argued with him, and he was glad she didn't. If Willi raised his voice and turned red-well, Willi was in the habit of doing such things. "A good thing they're friends, or they'd murder each other," Heinrich remarked to Erika.
With all the noise Lise and Willi were making, he wasn't sure she even heard him. But she nodded. "Willi's as bad as the children," she said, like Heinrich talking under the noise of the argument. "You, now, you have too much sense to waste your time with such foolishness."
"I don't know," he said. "Lise's doing it, and she's got more sense than I do."
"Maybe." Erika waved her hand. "But I don't want to go to bed with Lise."
What Heinrich wanted to say was,Are you out of your mind? Even if she did want to sleep with him (which struck him as strange enough when she was married to the much handsomer Willi), to say so in front of her husband and his wife? Maybe she'd known what she was doing, though, because neither Willi nor Lise leaped from a chair with a cry of fury. They were too busy quarreling over cuneiform styles and tree-ring chronology and other things about which neither of them knew a great deal.
Which left Heinrich the question of how to respond. Part of him knew exactly how he would like to respond. The rest of him told that part to shut up and forget about it. If he hadn't been happy with Lise, or maybe if he'd just been a few years younger, a few years randier, a few years stupider (assuming those last two weren't one and the same), that one part might have won the argument, especially since he got the idea he could have taken Erika right there on the card table without making either Willi or Lise notice.
But, things being as they were, yielding to temptation wasn't practical. And so he answered, "I'm sorry, but with all the racket these two are making, I didn't hear a word you said."
Erika Dorsch's sour smile told him she didn't believe a word of it. Whatdid she believe? That he didn't want to go to bed with her? Or just that he didn't want to do anything about it then and there?Isn't that an interesting question?
Deciding he didn't want to know the answer, Heinrich reached out and waved his hand up and down between Willi and Lise. "Can we get back to bridge, please?" he asked loudly.
His wife and Erika's husband both blinked, as if they were coming back to the real world. Willi said, "I don't know why you're so impatient. We just started talking-"
"And talking, and talking," Erika broke in, her voice acid-edged.
"Itwas fifteen minutes ago," Heinrich said.
"Oh,Quatsch, " Willi said. Then he looked at his watch and blinked again. He grinned a rather sickly grin. "Oh. Well, maybe it was." Lise seemed almost as surprised as he did.
"It's your lead, Willi, if you can think of anything besides ancient history," Erika said.
"Let me look at the last trick, please," Willi said, which went a long way toward proving he couldn't. He examined it, muttered to himself, and threw out a low diamond. As far as Heinrich could see, the lead might have come at random as readily as from reflection on what had gone before.
Heinrich made the contract. He and Lise went on to win the rubber, though not by nearly so much as they'd lost the first one. Shuffling for the first hand of the next rubber, Willi said, "We'll really hammer you this time."
"Tell me a new story," Heinrich answered. "I've heard this one before, and I don't believe a word of it."
"You'll see." Willi picked up his hand, arranged it in suits, and said, as casually as if he were asking the time, "Three no-trump."
"What?" Heinrich stared. His own hand didn't have opening strength, but he hadn't imagined Willi owned that kind of powerhouse. He hadn't seen a three-no opening in at least five years. He passed. So did Erika. Willi yelped and sent her a wounded look. Visions of another slam must have danced in his head. Lise passed, too. Heinrich led. Erika laid out her hand as dummy. It was ten-high-no wonder she'd passed.
Willi didn't even make the three he'd bid. With no strength on the board, he had to play everything out of his own hand, and came up one trick short. The honors bonus for all four aces more than made up for that. Even so, he let out a sorrowful sigh. "Twenty-eight high-card points I was looking at, and down one! I'll never see another hand like that."
The rest of the evening's bridge was less dramatic. The Gimpels and Dorsches ended up about even. As Heinrich and Lise walked to the bus stop, she asked, "What did you and Erika talk about while Willi and I were wrangling over Babylonians?"
"Oh, nothing much," Heinrich answered. He knew he would probably end up in trouble for not telling his wife what Erika had said. But if he did tell her, he'd end up in trouble, too.Sometimes you can't win, he thought, and kept walking.
V
AFTER GIVING THE FLAG THE NATIONALSOCIALIST SALUTE, Herr Kessler led Alicia Gimpel's class in singing "Deutschland uber Alles" and the "Horst Wessel Song": the German and Party anthems. That wasn't part of the usual morning routine, but he explained, "This is a special day, children, because the Reich has a new Fuhrer." His right arm shot out again. "Heil Buckliger!"
"Heil Buckliger!" Alicia and her classmates echoed dutifully. She hadn't known about the new Fuhrer till breakfast this morning, when her mother and father talked about him. Aunt Kathe hadn't watched Horst Witzleben, the way her parents did. Instead, she'd played with Alicia and her sisters, and sung silly songs, and told stories that were not only funny but also a good deal sassier than the ones the Gimpel girls heard from anybody else in the family.
Herr Kessler said, "The new Fuhrer will do wonderful things for the Reich and for the Germanic Empire. He is very wise and very good and very strong. He must be all those things, or he never would have been chosen Fuhrer."
He sounded very sure. Almost all the pupils in the classroom nodded without a moment's hesitation. Alicia nodded, too. She was learning to be a chameleon. But she couldn't help wondering,How does he know?
"Will things be any different now,Herr Kessler?" asked a boy-Alicia didn't see who.
The teacher frowned. The question was good enough that he had to answer it, but for a moment he seemed unable to find a way.Maybe nobody told him what to say, Alicia thought.He doesn't seem very good at figuring things out for himself. At last, Kessler said, "I think things will be better. The new Fuhrer is a young man-not too much older than I am-and he is active and vigorous. The old Fuhrer was very old indeed. He was sickly and feeble. Some of you may have grandparents or great-grandparents who are like that."
Several children nodded. Behind Alicia, Emma Handrick raised her hand. When Herr Kessler called on her, she said, "When my great-granddad got that way, my folks took him to a Reichs Mercy Center. Is that what they did with the old Fuhrer? "
"No.Gott im Himmel, no!" The teacher turned very red. The question must have rocked him. Alicia couldn't remember him ever saying anything about God before. She couldn't remember any of her teachers saying anything about God. She'd always had the idea that they weren't supposed to.Herr Kessler needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, "Kurt Haldweim lived out his whole life. He had to, you see, because he was serving the Reich. Do you understand?"
"Ja, Herr Kessler," Emma answered. She wasn't going to argue with him.
Alicia wanted to. Before she found out she was a Jew, she might have. She didn't dare stick out her neck now. Not being able to say what she thought sometimes made her feel as if she were choking. She wanted to cheer when a boy stuck up his hand. When the teacher pointed his way, he asked, "Excuse me,Herr Kessler, but if the old Fuhrer was all feeble, whydidn't they take him to a Reichs Mercy Center? Isn't that what you're supposed to do, before he becomes a burden?"
"the Fuhrer is not a burden," Kessler said stiffly. "the Fuhrer cannot be a burden. the Fuhrer is the Fuhrer."
By the way he spoke, that was supposed to settle things. Nobody in the class asked any more questions about the Reichs Mercy Centers, so maybe it did. Or maybe all the children realized asking more questions like that would only land them in trouble.
And maybe Herr Kessler realized he hadn't satisfied everybody with his answers, for he quickly changed the subject and plunged into the day's usual lessons. No one could challenge him on those. He went back to being the classroom Fuhrer, lord of all he surveyed.
For the history lesson, he rolled up the usual map of the world as it was now and rolled down a different map, one that showed the way things had been before the Second and Third World Wars. "Do you see how tiny the Reich was in those days, and how big our enemies were?" he said. "And yet we beat them, because we were Aryans and they were full of Jews. France, England, Russia, the United States-all full of Jews. And they fell into our hands one after another. What does this tell you? Alicia Gimpel!"
She sprang to her feet. "That Aryans are superior to Jews,Herr Kessler."
"Very good. Be seated."
She knew her lessons. She could recite them without fail. Reciting them when she didn't believe them, though, made her feel all slimy inside. She wanted to know what was true. She wanted to say what was true. She knew she would get in trouble if she did. That made going on with what she learned in school necessary. It didn't make it palatable.
Herr Kessler asked the next question of someone else. It was also anti-Semitic. Alicia didn't like hearing it, either. She wondered how Herr Kessler would like listening to anti-Aryan questions all day. She suspected he would get sick of it in a hurry.
She sighed. Things had been a lot simpler before she knew what she was.
When Lise Gimpel was a girl, she'd grated cabbage by hand. As often as not, that had involved grating some fingertip or knuckle in with the cabbage. Her father, an engineer, had always found that funny-they weren'this fingertips or knuckles, after all. When she yelped, he would say, "Adds protein," and puff on his pipe.
These days, Lise used a plastic rod to guide quartered chunks of cabbage into the maw of the food processor. The push of a button, a whir, and the job was done-not even a tenth the time, and never any need to reach for the Mercurochrome. But every time she did it, she imagined she smelled pipe tobacco.
She bit her lip. She'd been pregnant with Francesca when the damned drunk cut short her parents' lives. Alicia had been only a toddler then. She didn't remember her grandparents, and they'd never got to know their other grandchildren. Sometimes life seemed dreadfully unfair.
Lise laughed, not that it was funny.As if a Jew in the Third Reichshould look for fairness. But somehow God seemed extra malicious in piling a personal disaster on top of the one she'd been born with.
Alicia came into the kitchen. She liked to help cook. So did Roxane. Francesca didn't care one way or the other. Lise was glad to see her daughter. "Hello, sweetheart," she said. "How did it go today?" Talking with Alicia would help ease her out of her gloom.
So she thought, anyway, till Alicia blurted, "Mommy, do I have to be a Jew? I don't think I want to."
Before Lise answered, she automatically looked around. "Where are your sisters?"
"Upstairs doing homework. I finished mine."
"All right. Good. You have to be careful even saying that word." Lise put her hands on Alicia's shoulders. "Now-why don't you? What happened today that made you think you don't?"
"It's not just today," Alicia answered. "It's everything that's happened since I found out. People just keep saying mean things-horrible things-about Jews-and everybodybelieves them. It's like they're callingme names all the time."
"Oh, my dear." Lise gave Alicia a squeeze. Her daughter's head already came up past her shoulder. "I remember that, and I remember how much it hurt, too. They don't know any better, that's all."
"But if I weren't a Jew, then it wouldn't matter any more." Alicia could be as painfully logical as her father, though at ten she didn't always see as far as she needed to.
Lise cocked her head to one side to make sure she didn't hear one of Alicia's sisters charging downstairs at the worst possible moment. Even after she'd satisfied herself that they were busy, she needed a few seconds to marshal her thoughts. "If you decide that's what you end up wanting, pumpkin, you can do it. You can always pretend what we told you isn't real. We said so, remember?"
Alicia nodded. "I want to do that."
"You can. But I have to tell you, it may not be quite so simple. If you beat eggs together to scramble them, can you separate the whites out again afterwards to make meringue?"
"Of course not," Alicia said.
"Well, you can always live as though you're not a Jew, pretend you're not a Jew," Lise said. "But you'll know even so. You'll have to know. You can't very well forget, can you?"
"I can try." Alicia screwed up her face. Lise could tell she was doing her best to pretend that that evening with the Stutzmans and Susanna had never happened. Lise could also tell, by her daughter's despairing expression, that she was having no more luck than anyone else would have. Alicia pointed an accusing finger at her. "You and Daddy didn't tell me anything about that."
"No, we didn't," Lise admitted. "We thought it would be pretty obvious-and we didn't know you wouldn't want to be a Jew."
"I haven't got much choice, have I?" Alicia asked bleakly.
"You have a choice in the way you live." Lise picked her words with great care. "You haven't got a choice about what youare, not any more. When you have children, you'll have a choice about telling them what they are."
"Why would I ever want to put anybody else through this?" Alicia said.
Were there any Jews left in the Reich who hadn't asked themselves that question at least once? Were there any who hadn't asked it a thousand times? Quietly, Lise answered, "Because if you don't, then the Nazis win. They say we don't deserve to live, we don't deserve to be here at all. And if you don't tell your children what they are, who they are, aren't you saying you think the Nazis were right all along?"
"Weren't they?" Pain filled Alicia's voice. "If they thought Jews were horrible, ifeverybody thought Jews were horrible, if nobody tried to stop the SS from doing what it did, maybe Jews-maybewe really were horrible. Maybe wedeserved what happened."
That was another thought that had probably crossed every surviving Jew's mind. People saw themselves, at least in part, in the mirror their neighbors held up to them. If the mirror showed a twisted image, wouldn't they start to believe that was the way they really seemed? How could they help it?
"Some people did try to stop the SS. Not enough, though, and most of them got killed. But I don't think anybody deserves to be killed for what he is," Lise said. "You can't help that. If youdo something bad enough, maybe you deserve to die. That's a whole different argument, though. For just trying to live, and to get along as best you can?" She shook her head. "No, sweetheart."
Her daughter looked haunted. That was fair enough, too. How many millions of ghosts crowded the Germanic Empire? Better, maybe, not to try to count them all. That way lay despair. Alicia said, "I sure hope you're right."
So do I,Lise thought.But how can I know? How can anybody know? One thing she did know was that she had to conceal her doubts from her daughter. She said, "Of course I am."
"What am I going to do?" Alicia said, more to herself than to Lise.
But Lise answered her, with forced briskness: "What are you going to do? Since you've finished your homework and your sisters haven't, you're going to take a bath. And make sure you rinse all the shampoo out of your hair and wash behind your ears. Sometimes you leave enough dirt to grow potatoes in."
"Potatoes." Alicia thought that was funny. She was a child; she couldn't stay gloomy for long. She went up the stairs singing, "I'm my own vegetable garden."
Lise envied her that ability to swing away from sadness so fast.I used to be able to do that, she thought.I wonder where it went. Wherever it went, it was gone for good now. She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She hardly ever drank when she wasn't with other people who were drinking, but today she made an exception.
When Heinrich came through the door a few minutes later, Alicia-who hadn't yet started getting rid of the potatoes-Francesca, and Roxane all swarmed downstairs to give him hugs and kisses. He needed a couple of minutes to wade through them and make his way into the kitchen. He hugged Lise and kissed her, then noticed the glass of schnapps on the counter near the sink. "Tough day?" he asked. Lise nodded. Her husband pointed to the glass. "Must have been. You don't usually do that. What happened?"
"Later." Lise nodded in the direction of the children.
"Oh." Heinrich nodded, too. He went to the cabinet for a glass of his own and also filled it full of schnapps. "Well, here's to us."
"To us," Lise agreed. They both drank. Their daughters wandered into the kitchen. Roxane wanted to help. Francesca wanted to tell her father about something that had happened at school. Lise couldn't tell what Alicia wanted-maybe just to remind herself that they were a family. Alicia kept eyeing her little sisters with an expression that said,I know something you don't know.
By what she'd said to Lise a little while before, she wished she didn't.
After a while, the girls went back upstairs. "Make sure you get clean," Lise reminded Roxane-she'd sometimes skip a bath if she saw the chance.
"Well?" Heinrich asked.
Lise sighed. In a low, weary voice, she said, "Alicia said she didn't want to be a Jew. She said maybe the Einsatzkommandos knew what they were doing when they got rid of us."
"Oh. Oh, hell." Heinrich reached for his glass of schnapps and gulped at it. The laugh that burst from him was an ugly sound, one that had nothing to do with mirth. "Well, God knows she's not the first one of us to feel that way."
"I understand that," Lise said. "But still…"
"Yes. But still." Another swig and her husband's glass was empty. He poured it down like that about as often as Lise drank alone. With another ugly laugh, he said, "Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an SS man when I was a little boy? Before I knew, I mean."
"No." Lise shook her head in astonishment. They'd been married almost fifteen years, but startling things still surfaced, like rocks working their way up through thin soil. "No, you never said a word about that."
"Well, I did. I thought the black uniform was the most wonderful thing in the world, and of course this wasn't too long after we beat the United States, so SS men were heroes in all the movies and televisor shows where Wehrmacht men weren't. When my father told me, I didn't want to believe him. For a long time after that-along time, I'm telling you-I thought we had it coming to us."
"You never said anything about that. Never," Lise said.
Instead of answering right away, Heinrich poured himself another glass of schnapps. His back was to her as he said, "It's not exactly something I'm proud of, you know."
"I think we all go through it," Lise said. "You sound like you had it worse than most of us, though."
"I probably did." Her husband shook his head, still not looking at her. "No, I certainly did. Even now, there are days when working at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht seems like a poor second best, and I ought to have the SS runes on my collar tabs."
"Could you have kept up the masquerade if you did?" Lise asked.
"Some people do," Heinrich said, and she nodded. He sighed. "I'm glad-most of me is glad-I didn't have to try, though. Do you want me to talk with Alicia? Is she all right?"
"Maybe don't push it too hard right now," Lise said after a little thought. "You know how, how-overwhelming it can be. I think she'll settle down. She just realized she'll alwaysknow what she is, no matter what she decides to do about it."
"Ah, yes," Heinrich said. "That's another moment we all have, sure enough. The curse of knowledge…"
"Alicia thinks it's a curse right now," Lise said.
"I don't know what to do about it." Heinrich set about emptying that second glass of schnapps. "I wish I did, but I don't think anybody who's…in our boat does."
"We ought to have the Stutzmans over again," Lise said. "Anna's been coping with it for more than a year now. Maybe she can help Alicia-and even if she can't, they can play together. And I was on the phone with Esther this afternoon, and she says Susanna's back from London with all sorts of wild stories."
"Sounds good to me," Heinrich said. "I'm going to have lunch with Walther in the Tiergarten tomorrow. I'll set something up then, and you can call Susanna."
"All right." Lise nodded. "What does Walther want to talk about?" She assumed he wanted to talk about something. People met in Berlin's greatest park to get out in the open air-and also to get away from the possibility of talking where microphones might overhear.
Her husband answered with a shrug. "Don't know yet. I'll find out."
"Fair enough," Lise said. "What's new at work?"
"Not much. We're all waiting to see what sort of Fuhrer Heinz Buckliger makes, same as everybody else." Heinrich held up a hand. "Wait. I take it back. There is one other interesting thing. These past few days, Willi's been very friendly with Ilse, for whatever that may be worth."
"The secretary?" Lise asked. Heinrich nodded. Her next question was obvious: "Is she worth being friendly to?"
"Well, she doesn't do anything for me," he answered. "Of course, I'm not Willi, and I'm not squabbling with my wife. I hope I'm not, anyway." He leaned over and kissed her.
"You'd better not be," Lise said. "How does Ilse compare to Erika?"
"As far as looks go, she doesn't," Heinrich said. "But she's not telling Willi all the different kinds of fool he is every time he turns around, either. That's got to count for something, wouldn't you think?"
"It would with me," Lise agreed. "But with a man, who can say?" Heinrich made a face at that, but he didn't try to argue with her.
Walther Stutzman liked the Tiergarten. He enjoyed eating lunch there, regardless of whether he needed to talk with someone in something approaching privacy. If he brought a sandwich and some fruit and a vacuum flask of coffee to the large park west of the Brandenburg Gate, he could imagine himself in the country-if the country in which he imagined himself included plenty of other people eating, watching birds, strolling hand in hand, walking or running for exercise, or lying around in the sun in any clothing or next to none. The Berlin police did frown on complete public nudity, but more as a matter of excessive zeal than one of criminal intent. And what might go on under cover of the bushes…neither Walther nor the police were in the habit of investigating too closely.
Today he made a point of getting to the Tiergarten early, so he could stake out a bench before the noontime crowd made looking for one a hopeless chore. The grass was long and green. Come fall, a snorting harvester would mow it down and turn it into hay for animal fodder. In the meantime, it grew as it would.
He found a place to sit near the Hubertus fountain and the bronze fox-hunting group at the center of the park. He smiled, pleased with himself; he'd told Heinrich to start looking for him by the fountain. And here came his friend. Heinrich's gangly height and ungainly walk made him impossible to miss. Walther stood up and waved. A couple of beats slower than he should have, Heinrich waved back and came toward him.
"Hello," Walther said. "Nice day, isn't it?"
"Why, so it is," Heinrich said in mild surprise, as if he'd only just realized it. Maybe he had; there were times when Walther wondered how much that went on outside his own head his friend noticed. Heinrich sat down beside him."Was ist los?"
"You know about the Kleins?" Walther said.
"Oh, yes." Heinrich nodded, his long face set in unhappy lines. "I do know about that. What's up with them?"
"I changed their genealogy, to give them a couple of possibly Jewish ancestors," Walther said. Heinrich nodded again. With a sigh, Walther went on, "Their pediatrician is too damned efficient, though. He compared the revised chart with one he had from when their first son was born, and he noticed the changes. He not only noticed, he called in the genealogical authorities."
"Yes, I've heard all this," Heinrich said. "Esther told Lise, and Lise told me. It's a mess. One more thing for the Kleins-and for all of us-to worry about. Robert and Maria are still free, aren't they? That would be all we need, if they hauled them in for questioning-that on top of the poor baby."
"We're probably lucky we haven't seen more Tay-Sachs cases," Walther said. "So few of us left these days, and we marry among ourselves so much… But that's not what I wanted to talk about."
"What, then?" Heinrich asked.
"I made a mistake when I altered the Kleins' charts," Walther said. "Anything that gets us noticed for any reason at all is a mistake. The question is, how do I fix it?"
"Howcan you fix it? It's done," Heinrich said. A very pretty blond girl in a short sun dress walked by, leading a dachshund on a leash. Heinrich noticed her-and the ridiculous little dog.
Walther knew a certain amount of relief that some of the real world did impinge on his friend. He said, "Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. I could go back into the Reichs database again, and change the Kleins' records back to the way they were before I meddled the first time. Or I could just leave them alone and hope the storm blows over. Which do you think is the better bet?"
Heinrich's eyes got a faraway expression. Walther wasn't the avid bridge player some of Heinrich's goyishe friends were, but he'd sat down at the card table with him a few times. He wore this look when he was figuring out whether to run a finesse. He said, "If you leave things alone, they may decide the system hiccuped, or they may bring in the Kleins to try to find out what they know."
"That's how I see it," Walther agreed.
He wondered if Heinrich even heard him. His friend went on without even a pause for breath: "But if you change things a second time, they may decide the system hiccuped once but now it's back to normal, or they may decide somebody who isn't supposed to has access to it and can fiddle with it whenever he pleases."
Walther Stutzman nodded again. "I see it like that, too."
"All right, then," Heinrich said. "Both ways, if they think it's a hiccup, everything is fine. So which is more likely and more dangerous-them questioning the Kleins or them questioning the software in the database system? With the Kleins, it goes from no Jews in the woodpile to a few possible Jews in the woodpile a long time ago."
"On paper," Walther said. The Kleins were as Jewish as the Stutzmans or the Gimpels. He needed to make sure Heinrich remembered that. "If they have a baby with Tay-Sachs disease, that's a red flag about what they really are."
"It's a red flag, but it's not proof. This diseasecan happen to gentiles, too," Heinrich said.
"If the genealogical authorities want to snoop, they're liable to find enough proof to satisfy them," Walther said. "And there's no law that says they can't question the Kleinsand check the database programming."
Heinrich looked astonished. Maybe he'd been so caught up ineither-or that that hadn't occurred to him. Walther wished it hadn't occurred to him, too. Unfortunately, it was all too likely to occur to the authorities. He said, "This isn't damned if I do or damned if I don't. It's liable to be damned if I doand damned if I don't."
"I'm afraid you're right," Heinrich said.
"I'm afraid I'm right, too," Walther said. "And I'm afraid, period."
"You'd better be afraid. We'd all better be afraid," Heinrich said somberly. "If we're not afraid, we're dead. I think our best chance is sitting tight now, though. There's nothing to show the Kleins had any way to fiddle with the genealogical records, is there? He's a musician, and she's a Hausfrau. They can't lean on them too hard, not when the changes are so small."
He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as well as Walther. "Theycan do anything they want," Walther said bluntly, and his friend winced and nodded, for that was undoubtedly true. He went on, "What they choose to do…may be a different story. I hope you're right about that. So you think we ought to wait and see what happens, then?"
"Don't you think that's our best bet?" Heinrich asked.
Walther Stutzman sighed. "Overall, probably," he said. "But it's liable to be rough as hell on the Kleins. They're already trying to deal with what their baby has. If the genealogical authorities or the Security Police land on them, too-well, how much can one family take?"
Heinrich didn't answer. Walther hadn't expected him to. No one could answer that question for himself till the time of testing came, let alone for anyone else. Instead, Heinrich came back with a question of his own: "If you change the Kleins' records again, don't you think the genealogical authorities and the Security Police are liable to land onyou? How much can you take, Walther?"
And that was the other side of the coin. "I don't know," Walther said. "Here's hoping I don't have to find out, and the Kleins don't, either."
"That's interesting." Heinrich Gimpel tapped his copy of the Volkischer Beobachter to show Willi Dorsch what was interesting.
Willi shifted on the commuter-train seat beside Heinrich. "Which?" he said. "Oh, the story about the budget? Well, what to you expect Buckliger to say? Easy enough to promise to bring things under control. Doing it?" He shook his head. "Don't hold your breath."
"He sounds like he means it, though." Heinrich read out loud: "'For too long, the Greater German Reich has balanced its budget only with the aid of tribute from other lands within the Germanic Empire. If we are the greatest nation the world has known, should we not be able to pay our own way?'"
"Hell with that," Willi said. "Make the other bastards pay instead. They're the ones who lost. You wait and see. He's got it off his chest now: the new Fuhrer can talk tough. But nothing's going to change."
Willi usually had good political sense. Heinrich reminded himself of that. Still, he couldn't help adding, "He's going on about high labor costs, too, and how we need to be honestly competitive and not just dictate favorable exchange rates to the rest of the world. We can't quite dictate to the Japanese, and look how their electronics have come on the past ten years."
"Are you going to tell me they stack up to Zeiss?" Willi snorted. "Don't make me laugh."
"A friend of mine works for Zeiss, and he's not laughing," Heinrich said. "You're right-what the Japanese make isn't as good as our stuff. But it's good enough to work, and it's a lot cheaper. For people who haven't got a whole lot of Reichsmarks to spend-"
"People who think like Jews," Willi broke in.
Heinrich shrugged. "Joke all you please." To Willi, it was just a joke, too. Heinrich knew he should be used to gibes like that. Hewas used to them, in the sense that his face didn't show what he thought. But they still burned. He went on, "No matter how you joke, though, plenty of people who can't afford our electronics can afford to buy from the Japs."
Willi twirled his finger in a gesture that had meantso what? for the past two generations. "That hasn't really got much to do with the budget, you know."
Although Heinrich didn't know any such thing, he didn't argue. He'd been taught since childhood not to disagree too strongly with anyone. Instead, he rustled the Volkischer Beobachter and changed the subject a little, saying, "What do you make of this? the Fuhrer says, 'As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the state, a thorough examination of its political underpinnings must also be undertaken.' What's that mean?"
"What? Where does he say that?" Willi opened up his own copy of the paper again. "Have to tell you, I missed it."
"Page four, third column, about halfway down."
"Page four…" When Willi finally found it, he shook his head. "He couldn't have buried it any deeper in a graveyard, could he?" He rubbed his chin and frowned. "I have to admit, I don't know exactly what that means. I bet nobody else does, either, except maybe Buckliger. It might just be the sort of stuff politicians use to pad out a speech." But he was still frowning. "You wouldn't put padding there, though-not usually. He wanted to say it, and he wanted to say it where not many people would notice he'd said it. I sure didn't. You notice everything, don't you?"
"Me? Only thing I notice is, we're coming into the Berlin station." Heinrich folded his newspaper and stuck it in his briefcase. Easier to carry just one thing when they hurried up the escalators to the level where they caught the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Willi did the same.
A three-car accident snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Ambulances, police vehicles, and rubberneckers meant nothing could get through at a busy intersection. The police were slower setting up detours than they should have been, too. Everyone in the bus grumbled and complained. That did no one any good. Heinrich and Willi got to work half an hour late.
The guards at the entrance clucked sympathetically as the two of them hurried up the steps. "Came from South Station, didn't you?" one guard said when Heinrich held out his identity card. "Things are buggered up good and proper between there and here."
"Don't I know it!" Heinrich said. "I thought I'd be on that damned bus forever." The card went through the reader. The light flashed green. The guard returned the card and waved him through.
Willi joined him a moment later. "At least we're not the only ones," he said. "Misery loves company."
"Misery doesn't love anything," Heinrich said. "That's what makes it misery."
"Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!" Willi came to attention and saluted. "Thank you so much for clearing that up for me."
"When we work in the same room, I can't even tell you to go away," Heinrich said sadly.
They navigated the maze of corridors to get to the room they shared with several other budget analysts, secretaries, and clerks. Willi promptly disappeared from his desk. Heinrich knew he was heading to the canteen for coffee, and didn't think anything of it. Willi came back with two foam cups. He kept one and, with a flourish, handed the other to the secretary he and Heinrich shared. Ilse stammered out thanks, simpering like a starstruck teenager. Willi preened. Heinrich fought not to gag.
He had plenty to keep him busy. He always did. His fingers flashed across the keys of his adding machine. The number and function keys had grown smooth and shiny from long use. Some of the more senior men in the department were getting new adding machines, half as big and half as noisy as the old ones. The new machines came from Japan. Heinrich wondered if Willi knew. As for himself, he didn't want to give up the one he'd used for so long. In a lot of ways, he was intensely conservative. Change made him suspicious; it might lead to exposure. As long as things went on as they had up till now, his family and he stayed safe.
The phone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich noticed it only peripherally. He was trying to unravel by exactly how much the Americans were pretending to be poorer than they really were. He might not have noticed the phone on his own desk. The Americans used numbers the way a cuttlefish used ink: to obscure, to conceal, to confuse. Figuring out what lay behind their smokescreen took not only patience but imagination.
But in spite of his best effort to focus on the columns of numbers in front of him, Willi's loud, angry voice eventually pierced his concentration: "Dammit, Erika, don't call me here for crap like that! I haven't got time to worry about it, and I sure as hell haven't got time to deal with it."
Heinrich looked up. He couldn't help himself. He saw he wasn't the only one. Nor, of course, was Willi the only one who'd ever had his personal life intrude on work. But he was the one with problems at the moment, which meant he was the one everybody else was pretending not to listen to now. That he was one of the more flamboyant men in the office only made his troubles more fascinating.
Erika said something. Heinrich couldn't make out what it was, but she sounded angry, too. He wouldn't have wanted to talk to her the way Willi just had. Whatever she said, it struck a nerve. Willi went red from the base of his neck all the way up to his forehead and ears. "That's a lie, too," he growled. "I'm just being friendly. You wouldn't know about friendly, would you?"
Someone must have told Erika about Ilse-or maybe Willi was being friendly, or more than friendly, with some woman Heinrich knew nothing about. He looked back to the numbers the Americans had submitted to the Reich. Before he could do anything but look, Erika said something else.
"Me?" Willi exclaimed. "Me?You've got your nerve! What about you and-" He didn't go on. Instead, he slammed the receiver into its cradle hard enough to start a young earthquake.
Had be been about to say,What about you and Heinrich? Erika hadn't been subtle. She'd done everything but send up a flare, in fact. Up till now, Willi hadn't paid much attention-or so it seemed. But maybe he could see what was right under his nose after all.
Or, then again, maybe he couldn't. His color faded as quickly as it had risen. He managed a smile of sorts as he swung his swivel chair toward Heinrich. "Women are strange creatures-you know that?" He might have been imparting some great philosophical truth. "We can't live with them, and we can't live without them, either."
Fourteen placid, happy years of marriage with Lise looked better and better to Heinrich. "I hope everything turns out all right for you," he said.
"So do I," Willi said. "Sometimes, though, what can you do?" He sounded as happy-go-lucky as usual. He meant,You can't do anything-things will either work out or else they won't. If Heinrich's marriage were in trouble when he wanted to keep it going, he would have tried everything under the sun-and looked in the dark, too, in case it was hiding something the sun didn't show. Did that mean Willi didn't want to keep his marriage going, or did it mean he didn't want to try? Heinrich didn't know. He couldn't tell. He wondered if Willi knew.
When lunchtime came, Heinrich said, "Shall we go to Admiral Yamamoto's?"
Willi nodded. "Why not? We haven't been there since the day old Haldweim kicked the bucket."
"Uh, right." True, the old Fuhrer was dead. Even so, Heinrich couldn't have made himself talk about the ruler of the Germanic Empire so casually-so callously, even. Willi, confident in his perfect Aryanness, could be more expansive.Or maybe he doesn't think about it at all. Maybe he just says the first thing that comes out of his mouth.
Heinrich found that hard to imagine, let alone believe. But Willi was a law unto himself. He had been for as long as Heinrich had known him, and no doubt for years before that.
Sitting in the Japanese restaurant, eating Berlin rolls and sashimi and rice and washing them down with a seidel of beer (German beer, not Japanese-Japanese electronics were fine, but Japanese beer couldn't measure up to the Reinheitsgebot, the medieval purity law, and was barred from the Greater German Reich), Heinrich tried not to worry about anything except the havoc the wasabi was playing with his sinuses. But Admiral Yamamoto's got customers from a lot of ministries, and the SS men at the next table were too loud to ignore.
"Did you read the Volkischer Beobachter this morning?" one of them demanded of his pals. "Didyou?"
"Can SS men read?" Willi said-in Heinrich's opinion, not nearly quietly enough.
"I saw it, all right," another blackshirt-a bruiser-answered. "That goddamn son of a bitch."
"Takes one to know one," Willi said-again, much too loud.
"Oh,Willi," Heinrich murmured. The other table held five SS men. If they got mad, it wouldn't even be a brawl. It would be a slaughter. But getting Willi to pay attention…was like getting him not to lead away from kings. You could wish, and much good wishing would do you.
Then the first SS man, a Sturmbannfuhrer, said, "He's going to bring it in by the back door. You wait and see if he doesn't."
Before Willi could make yet another rude comment-and Heinrich knew just what sort of rude comment he would make about that-the bruiser nodded and said, "Bet your ass he is. 'A thorough examination of its political underpinnings.'" He made a loud retching noise.
And Willi Dorsch, canny political creature that he was, suddenly became quiet as a mouse. If he could have wiggled his ears, he would have swung them toward the table full of SS men. Heinrich felt the same way. The blackshirts weren't talking about just any goddamn son of a bitch. They were talking about Heinz Buckliger, newly chosen Fuhrer and the most powerful man on the planet.
"Sure as hell, we'll hear more crap about the first edition," another SS man predicted gloomily. "If we'd hadour way, we'd've knocked that stinking nonsense over the head once and for all."
"That's about the size of it," the Sturmbannfuhrer -the most senior man at the table-agreed. "But the Wehrmacht wouldn't play ball with us, and so we got stuck with this asshole."
A fragment of Latin went through Heinrich's head.Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Whowould watch the watchmen? The SS was and always had been a law unto itself. Maybe, between them, the rest of the Party and the Wehrmacht could keep it in check. And, by all the signs, the SS itself had split on a candidate to replace Kurt Haldweim. That seemed promising. If no one else could, maybe some of the watchmen would keep an eye on the rest.
"He's young, too." The bruiser sounded depressed at the prospect.
"Well, maybe-" But the Sturmbannfuhrer broke off. Whathad he been about to say?Maybe he won't live to get old? No, that wasn't the sort of thing to blurt out in a crowded restaurant. Had Heinrich wanted to say it, he couldn't imagine anyone but Lise whom he trusted enough to hear it. Even as things were, the blackshirts had run their mouths far more than he thought wise.
He looked at his watch. "Getting on towards one o'clock," he said. "We'd better head back to the office." Willi looked at him as if he'd lost his mind, or possibly started speaking Chinese. He wanted to hang around and listen to the SS men. That was exactly why Heinrich wanted to leave. He kicked his friend in the ankle under the table. Reluctantly, Willi left his chair. Heinrich paid the bill. They left the restaurant together.
Once out on the sidewalk, Willi practically exploded with excitement. "Did you hear them?" he demanded. "Did youhear them? Practically talking treason, right there in Admiral Yamamoto's!"
"Don't be silly. How can SS men talk treason?" Heinrich said. "What they want is what the state wants. And if you don't believe me, just ask them."
"Ha!" Willi said. "I didn't know you were such a funny fellow."
"I wasn't joking."
"I know. That only makes it funnier, but you have to look at it the right way to see it." Willi walked along for a while, whistling a tune from the new show about a theater owner who wanted an excuse to close down his firetrap of a house, booked a dreadful play about the evil machinations of Churchill and Stalin, and found to his horror that it was bad enough to become a comedy smash. The show itself was a comedy smash in Berlin, too, and had already spawned several companies touring the rest of the Reich. After a block or so, Willi stopped whistling-a mercy, because he was flat. He said, "Well, I hate to admit it, but you were right."
"About what? Getting out of Yamamoto's? You bet I was."
"No, no, no." Willi impatiently shook his head. "About that piece in the Beobachter this morning. If those bastards don't like it, there's got to be more to it than I thought. Buckliger does need to take a good long look at our underpinnings after all." A girl with nice legs came toward them. Willi said not a word about her underpinnings. Heinrich knew then that his friend was serious. After a few more steps, Willi added, "You may have been right about something else, too."
"What, twice in one day?" Heinrich said. "Such compliments you pay me. I've caught up with a stopped clock."
"No, you haven't, because this other one was a while ago." Willi waited to make sure Heinrich was suitably chastened, then went on, "If our lovely luncheon companions don't care for the first edition, it's probably got something going for it, too."
"You never said anything like that before." Heinrich didn't try to hide his surprise.
"That's because I thought it was a load of garbage before," Willi answered. "But if those Schweinehunde think the same thing…then they're wrong, and that means I must be wrong, too."
Heinrich made as if to feel his forehead. "You must be feverish, is what you must be. Saying I'm right? Saying you're wrong? Delirium, if you ask me."
"Get away from me." Willi sidestepped to escape Heinrich, and almost bumped into a man wearing the light blue of a Luftwaffe official. They made mutual apologies. The Luftwaffe man kept going up the street, towards Admiral Yamamoto's. Willi looked back over his shoulder. "Iam in a state. I can't help wondering if that fellow's on his way to plot with the thugs in black shirts."
That hadn't even occurred to Heinrich. "If you see plotters behind every potted plant, they're going to put you in a rubber room, you know."
"Not if the plotters are really there," Willi said. "Was Hitler wrong when he said everybody ganged up on Germany after the First World War? No, because everybody really did. You only get in trouble when you see things that aren't there."
"Right." Heinrich knew when arguing with Willi was more trouble than it was worth. This looked to be one of those times.
When they got back to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Ilse came up to them and said, "Excuse me, Willi, but you got another call from your wife." She rolled her eyes to show what she thought of that. The secretary was supposed to call Willi Herr Dorsch. That she didn't made Heinrich Gimpel want to roll his eyes. She did address Willi as Sie rather than using the intimatedu, but she sounded as if she were usingdu even when she wasn't.
"What did Erika want?" Willi asked. "Do I want to know?"
Ilse pouted. Willi's eyes lit up. The Berlin rolls roiled in Heinrich's stomach. Ilse said, "She wouldn't leave a message-just told me to tell you to call her back. And she said she wondered why I was there when you weren't. That wasn't very nice."
Scowling, Willi said, "I'll call her. I don't know what I'll call her, but I'll call her." Ilse thought that was very funny. Heinrich retreated to his desk. He'd never seen financial statements look so alluring.
But, however much the numbers beckoned, he couldn't avoid hearing Willi's side of the conversation-if a shouting match could be dignified by the term. The longer it went on, the louder and angrier Willi got. At last, he slammed down the phone."Scheisse," he muttered.
Heinrich felt like saying the same thing. If Willi and Erika were fighting, she'd be looking for a shoulder to cry on, and the first shoulder she was likely to look for was his. His shoulder wouldn't be the only thing she was looking for, either. He stared up to the heavens-or at least to the sound-deadening tiles and fluorescent panels of the ceiling. What red-blooded man wouldn't want a beautiful blonde in hot pursuit of him? Heinrich didn't, and he had one. Most of the men who would have liked nothing better had to do without. If that wasn't unfair, he couldn't imagine what would be.
"Guten Morgen,Dr. Dambach," Esther Stutzman called as she walked into the pediatrician's office.
"Guten Morgen, Frau Stutzman." Dambach's voice floated out from the back. "How are you today?"
"I'm fine, thanks. How are you?" Esther answered. He didn't ask her to help him set the coffeemaker to rights, which had to mean he hadn't tried messing with it before she got there. She took a look. Sure enough, it wasn't even plugged in. She loaded it with water and ground coffee and put in a filter. "I'm making coffee, Dr. Dambach," she called. "Would you like some when it's ready?"
"Ja, bitte,"he said. "Somehow, you always get it just right."
"I'm glad you like it," she said, in lieu of calling him a thumb-fingered idiot. He wasn't an idiot, and she knew it. He was a very sharp man; she could wish he were less so. But, whenever he got near a coffeemaker, thumb-fingered he definitely was. Before long, she brought him a steaming foam cup. "Here you are, Doctor."
"Danke schon."Dambach sipped. "Yes, that's very good. And you know just how much sugar I take, too."
"I should, by now." Esther lingered for a moment, wondering if he felt like making small talk. Sometimes he did; more often he didn't. When he picked up the coffee cup again, she slipped back to her station and looked at the morning's appointments. When she saw Paul Klein's name on the list, she grimaced. If only she'd thought to look in Eduard's chart…
She tried not to think about that as she checked the computer to see whose bills were overdue. She printed out polite dunning letters for those whose first notice this was, sterner ones for people getting a second reminder, and letters threatening legal action for two dedicated deadbeats. She happened to know Dr. Dambach had never sued anybody, but with a little luck the people who hadn't paid him wouldn't.
She took the letters in to him for his signature. She could have made the squiggle that passed for that signature at least as well herself, but that wasn't how things were done. "Oh, the Schmidts," Dambach muttered when he came to one of the strongest letters. "I just heard they bought themselves a new Mercedes-and they paid cash."
"Oh, dear," Esther said. "Maybe you really ought to talk to your lawyer, then."
The pediatrician shook his head. "I don't want to have anything to do with the courts, not if I can help it. Whether you're right or you're wrong, you go into court a pig and you come out a sausage. I'd rather do without the fee. But seeing the Schmidts spend their money on everything but their bills does sometimes tempt me to prescribe ipecac for their brat."
Esther laughed; she knew he was even less likely to do something like that than he was to sue. Take his anger out on a child? Impossible. Unthinkable. But what if he found out a child he treated was a Jew? She had no doubt he would call the authorities, and never lose a moment's sleep afterwards worrying about what happened to it or to its family. He was conscientious, law-abiding-a good German.
She took the signed letters and made envelopes for them. The stamps she used were black-and-white mourning issues for Kurt Haldweim. As she put them on one by one, she wondered about the folk among whom she lived-something else she'd done many times before. Germans were the sort of people who would stay on the path and off the grass in a park even if someone was shooting a machine gun at them.
And yet…A lot of the Jews surviving in Berlin were there because Germans had helped their parents or grandparents get false papers during the war. Without the right papers, life in the Reich had been impossible even so long ago. They'd been easier to get then, when enemy bombs sent records up in smoke and replacements were issued without many awkward questions. More than a few friends and neighbors had vouched for Jews, and some of them, discovered, had paid for their kindness with years in prison or with life itself.
And some Jews in Nazi hands had kept themselves alive-for a while-by going out onto the streets of Berlin and capturing other Jews still free. Set them in the scales against the brave Germans and it taught you…what? Esther sighed. Only what anyone with a gram of sense already knew: that there were good Jews and bad Jews, in proportions not much different from those of any other folk.
The door to the outer office opened. Esther looked at the clock in surprise. Was it nine already? It really was. In came a squat, heavyset woman with jowls and protruding eyes. She looked like nothing so much as a bulldog. And her seven-year-old daughter, poor thing, might have been her in miniature.
"Good morning,Frau Bauriedl," Esther said. "And how is Wilhelmina today?"
"Well, that's what I want the doctor to see,"Frau Bauriedl answered.
She brought Wilhelmina in every couple of weeks regardless of whether anything was really wrong with the little girl. Dr. Dambach tried to discourage her, but he hadn't had much luck. She did pay her bills on time; neither Esther nor any of the other receptionists had ever had to send her even the most polite letter.
The telephone rang. "Excuse me," Esther said, glad for an excuse not to have to talk to Frau Bauriedl. She picked up the handset. "Dr. Dambach's office."
"Frau Stutzman?" The woman on the other end of the line waited for Esther to agree that she was herself, then went on, "This is Maria Klein,Frau Stutzman. I'm…I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel Paul's appointment this morning. You see, we are under investigation for something…something of which we are certainly not guilty. Good-bye." She hung up.
She hadn't let on that she knew Esther in any way except as the pediatrician's receptionist. There in the warm, bright, sterile calm of Dambach's office, Esther shivered as if caught in a Lapland blizzard. Was Maximilian Ebert or some other hard-faced Nazi in the uniform of the Reichs Genealogical Office or the Security Police standing next to Maria, listening to every word she said and how she said it? Or was she just afraid her line was tapped?
Under investigation. How long had it been since the Germans caught a Jew in Berlin? It must have been some time not long after Esther found out she was one. There had been a great hue and cry then. How much more strident would it be now, when the whole Reich was thought to be Judenfrei for years? And if the Kleins were found guilty of such a heinous crime, what else would the investigators be able to tear out of them?
When Esther got to her feet, her legs didn't want to hold her up. She held on to the top of the desk for a moment till she steadied. She made the trip back to Dr. Dambach's personal office more by main force of will than any other way. He looked up from a medical journal, a question on his face. "That telephone call was from Frau Klein," Esther said carefully. She had to watch every word, too, in case her turn came up next. "She won't be bringing Paul in this morning after all."
"No?" Dambach said. "Have she and her husband decided to take him to the Reichs Mercy Center, then? It's the only sensible thing to do, I'm afraid."
Was it? For someone old and in torment from, say, cancer, it might be. For a baby? But, on the other hand, for a baby doomed to a lingering, horrible, certain death? Esther just didn't know. That was beside the point now, though. Shaking her head, she answered, "No, because she and her husband are-under investigation, she said."
"Are they?" Dr. Dambach didn't need to ask why they were being investigated. He was the one to whom the possibility had first occurred. "Well, I'm sure the authorities will get to the bottom of it. If they do turn out to be Jews, who could have imagined such a thing in Berlin in the twenty-first century?"
"Yes, who?" Esther hoped she matched his tone. Feeling spiteful, she added, "And Frau Bauriedl is here with Wilhelmina."
"Is she?" The pediatrician scowled. "It's a shame the powers that be aren't investigating her. The Kleins have always seemed like nice people. But appearances can be deceiving. If they're Jews…" He shook his head. "We certainly can't let that sort of thing go on, can we?"
Before Esther had to come up with a response to that, the telephone rang again. "Excuse me, Doctor," she said, and hurried out to answer it. A worried mother had a three-year-old who was throwing up. Esther fit her into the slot the Kleins had vacated. Even that made her want to cry.
The worst of it was, she didn't dare call people to warn them. If the Kleins were under suspicion, she and Walther might be, too. Her warnings could turn into betrayals. She wouldn't risk that. Even if she called to say she would be dropping by to pass on some news-even that might be too much. She had to assume she was being watched, being listened to. Maybe she wasn't. She hoped-she prayed-she wasn't. But she couldn't take the chance. She had to act as if she were.
And what's the use of praying to a God Who has made us fair game all over the world for a lifetime? That question and others of the same sort floated to the surface like rotting corpses whenever times turned black. Only one answer had ever occurred to Esther. She fell back on it now.If I don't believe, if I turn my back and walk away, then aren't I saying the Nazis were right all along, and we shouldn't go on?
Usually, that was enough to keep her on her course. She could be very stubborn. A Jew who wasn't stubborn these days didn't stay a Jew. When times got uncommonly black, though, she couldn't help wondering,Did I stay on course for so long-for this?
If God couldn't forgive her for wondering…Too bad for Him,she thought.
"Come right in,Frau Bauriedl, Wilhelmina," she said. "I'm sure Dr. Dambach will be so glad to see you again." If Dambach couldn't forgive her for lying…Too bad for him.
A woman brought in a wailing toddler who was tugging at his ear. She looked harried. "I hope the doctor can see me soon," she said. "Rudolf started this at ten last night, and he's been going ever since. My husband and I haven't had much sleep."
"There's only one patient in front of you,Frau Stransky," Esther said. "I'm sure it won't be too long. Would you like some coffee while you're waiting?"
"Oh, please!"Frau Stransky said, as if Esther had offered her the Holy Grail. Esther gave her a cup. By the way she gulped it down, she wished she had an intravenous caffeine drip hooked up instead. Esther had had mornings like that, too, even if her children hadn't had to go through many earaches.
More women came in with children in tow. In the examination room,Frau Bauriedl droned on and on about Wilhelmina's imaginary afflictions. The only thing really wrong with Wilhelmina was that she looked like her mother.
At last, after too long, Dr. Dambach must have got a little more abrupt than he was in the habit of doing. Frau Bauriedl's tones grew shriller and more indignant. "The nerve!" she said as she swept her daughter past Esther. "I think we'll see someone else the next time." She'd made that threat before. Esther wished she would do it, but she hadn't yet.
Whenever the door to the waiting room opened, Esther had to fight against a flinch. Would it be someone in the somber uniform of the Security Police? Whenever the phone rang, her hand wanted to shake as she reached for it. Would someone be warning her of a new disaster?
If the Security Police had operatives in Dr. Dambach's office, they were disguised as worried mothers-one of the most effective disguises Esther could imagine, and also one of the most unnecessary. All the phone calls featured more worried mothers except one. That one had a worried father: a cartoonist who worked out of his house. "Ja, Herr Wasserstein, you can bring Luther in at half past two this afternoon," Esther told him.
As soon as Irma came in during the lunch hour, Esther left. She had one more anxious moment walking out of the building. Would they bundle her into a car and take her away to God only knew where? They didn't. She walked to the bus stop. No one bothered her at all.
But the fear didn't go away. It never would.
Susanna Weiss had lived in fear ever since she was ten years old. Fear made her angry. It always had. She'd been living with rage since she was ten, too. Most of the time, she lived with it by making everyone around her live with it. That had made her more respected-and certainly more feared-than any of the other handful of female professors in the Department of Germanic Languages. "Don't mess with her-it's more trouble than it's worth" was the watchword these days at Friedrich Wilhelm University, not just in the department but also in the administration.
Some things, though, were too big and too strong to fight.
Jews didn't-couldn't-fight the apparatus of the Nazi Party. That was as much an article of faith these days as Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Reich bestrode the world like a colossus. And we petty Jews walk under its huge legs, and peep about to escape our dishonorable graves.
Susanna knew that was a misquotation, no matter how true it was. Shakespeare, these days, was more vitally alive in Germany than in his native land. A series of splendid nineteenth-century translations left his words much closer to modern German than his original language was to modern English, which made him easier for people here to follow.
If the Reichs Genealogical Office was going to start asking questions of the Kleins…Her heart turned to a lump of ice within her. She couldn't help it, any more than a bird was supposed to be able to keep from letting a snake mesmerize it.
"Do you want to talk here?" she asked Esther Stutzman. "Or would you rather go over to the Tiergarten? It's only a couple of blocks."
Her apartment was small and cramped and full of books, and even closer to the university than to the park. It ate up an inordinately large chunk of her salary, but she couldn't think of anything on which she would rather have spent her money.
Esther set a teacup down on a table crowded with ill-informed essays on The Canterbury Tales. "Well, that depends," she said carefully, and waited.
It depends on whether you think someone has planted a microphone here. That was what she meant, all right. Susanna looked around the place. She had books in German and English and Dutch and all the Scandinavian languages (including Old Icelandic). Paintings and prints filled the wall space bookshelves didn't. An alarmingly authentic reproduction of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship stared from an end table. She was not the neatest of housekeepers. If the Security Police had sneaked in to bug the place, she would never know it till too late.
"Why don't we walk?" she said. "The park is very nice in the afternoon."
"Then let's go." Esther got to her feet.
And the Tiergartenwas very nice in the afternoon, too. The sun was bright and warm. Sparrows hopped here and there, trying to steal bread crumbs from the pigeons that pensioners fed.Germans are a strange folk, Susanna thought.They're very kind to animals. They save their savagery for people, where it really counts.
"All right," she said. "Tell me how this happened."
Esther did, flaying herself in the process. To make matters worse, she had to flay herself in a bright, cheerful voice so people walking or cycling past wouldn't wonder what the two women were talking about so intently. "If only I'd found Eduard Klein's old genealogy chart, none of this would have happened," she said, a wide, false smile on her face. "But I didn't think to look, and so the Kleins…have a problem." She could say that safely enough. Anyone might have a problem.
The problemsgoyimhave aren't so likely to be fatal. Susanna bit her lip. The Kleins would have had a fatal problem even if Esther had purloined the chart. Susanna had never heard of Tay-Sachs disease till a few weeks before, but that kind of problem didn't care whether you'd heard of it. It came right in, introduced itself, and settled down to stay.
"Too late to fret about it now," she told Esther. "It's done. We'll go on."
"Easy for you to say," Esther replied. "You didn't do it. You don't wake up in the middle of the night wishing you had it to do over again."
Susanna shrugged. "If it goes wrong, it goes wrong for me, too. If they squeeze the Kleins tight enough to get them to name you and Walther, do you think they won't name me?"
They walked past a fountain. Esther said, "I want to jump in and drown myself."
"Don't be foolish. If you're foolish, you're liable to give yourself away." Susanna paused to think. Fighting her way up through the male-dominated hierarchies at Friedrich Wilhelm University had taught her one thing: the system was there to be manipulated, if only you could find the lever. She thought she saw one here. "You say Maria told you they were being investigated?"
"That's right." Esther nodded miserably.
"And she was at home?" Susanna persisted.
"Yes." Esther nodded again.
"Then they aren't sure. They can't be sure," Susanna said. "If they were sure, they'd haul her and her husband-and Eduard, too, damn them-off to the Genealogical Office or to the closest police headquarters and go to work on them. Thank God Eduard's too little to know what he is."
Esther remained distraught. "Who says they won't?"
"Nobody says they won't. But if they werereally suspicious, they would have done it already," Susanna said. "That means they're trying to panic people into doing something foolish so they get more to work with."
"They're doing a pretty good job, too," Esther exclaimed.
But Susanna shook her head. As it did with her, fear began to give way to anger. "Not yet. Not if the Kleins can sit tight and keep saying, 'We have no idea how any of this happened.' They ought to find a lawyer, too, a big, noisy one."
"As if a lawyer will do them any good!" Esther said. "What lawyer in his right mind would want anything to do with somebody who might have Jewish blood? The first case he lost, he'd go to the camp along with his clients."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. There are lawyers who deal with Mischlingsrechts, " Susanna said. "One of the games they play in the Party is accusing somebody they don't like of having Jewish blood. Most of the time, it's a big, fat lie, which is why the attorneys who specialize in mixed-blood lawdon't go to camps. It happened at the university a few years ago, too, which is how I happen to know about it." She made a face, as if she'd smelled something foul. "You wouldn't believe how nasty academic politics can get."
"After all the horror stories you've told, maybe I would," Esther said. Susanna had her doubts. Her friend was simply too nice to imagine the depths to which people could sink. And if that wasn't an aid to survival in the Greater German Reich, Susanna didn't know what would be.
She said, "They ought to threaten to sue, too."
Behind her glasses, Esther's eyes got big. "Sue the government? They'd get shot for even thinking about it!"
Susanna shook her head again. "No, they'd just lose or have their suit quashed before it ever came to trial. But if they talk big, if they hit back hard, people will think they must be innocent, because nobody who's guilty acts like that."
There was, or had been, a saying in English.The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet -that was how it went. It held some truth, too. Germans who thought they had the whip hand acted like it. And those who didn't, groveled.
Esther was a quiet and quietly orderly person herself. Susanna wasn't, and never had been. She hit back whenever she could, sometimes in small ways, sometimes not. Up till now, she'd never had the chance to hit back at the Reich itself. She'd imagined it-what Jew didn't? But dreams of vengeance remained only dreams. She wasn't crazy. She knew they'd never be anything else. Still, even the prospect of tying the system up in knots looked good to her.
"Do you really think I ought to tell this to the Kleins?" Esther asked doubtfully. "Won't it just land them in worse trouble?"
Susanna looked around. Nobody was particularly close to the two of them. No one was paying them any special heed, either. She could speak freely, or as freely as anyone could ever speak in the Greater German Reich. "They're under suspicion of being Jews," she said. "How can they get in worse trouble than that?"
To her surprise, Esther actually thought it over. "Maybe if they were homosexual Gypsies…But then they wouldn't have a baby, would they?"
"No." Susanna fought laughter, though it was only blackly funny. The Reich had been at least as thorough about getting rid of Gypsies as it had with Jews. She didn't know whether any survived. If so, they too were in hiding. As for homosexuals, the few high up in the Party hierarchy and those who traveled in certain circles of the SS did as they pleased. Others still faced savage persecution. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, they couldn't be rooted out all at once, for they kept springing up like new weeds every year. If nothing else, they gave the authorities something to do.
"We've come all the way to the zoo," Esther said in amazement. "Shall we go in and look at the animals?"
"No!" Susanna startled even herself with the force of her reaction. She had to stop and think to figure out why she felt the way she did. "I don't want to look at lions and elephants and ostriches in cages, not when I'm in a cage myself."
"Oh." Esther thought that over, too. After a little while, she said, "But people like the animals. Berliners have always liked animals." As if to prove her point, a man perhaps old enough to have served in the Second World War sat on a park bench scattering torn-up bits of bread for birds and squirrels.
"You're right, but I don't care." Susanna stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. That was the expression Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff had come to dread. "They're still trapped in there, and I don't want anything to do with them."
Esther didn't argue. She'd known Susanna long enough to know how impractical arguing with her could be. She just shrugged and said, "In that case, let's head back to your apartment."
"All right." Susanna was glad enough to turn around. She sighed. "I never thought I'd wish I were living in England."
"Why would you?" Esther asked. "Over there, they have their own people watching them, and they have us, too."
"But they have a party that's serious about turning over a new leaf," Susanna answered. "We don't. Oh, people say the new Fuhrer will be something different, but I'll believe it when I see it."
"I hope it's true," Esther said. "Maybe it'll mean easier times for…everybody." She chose the innocuous word because a man in a brown Party uniform came past them. He looked intent on his own business, but Susanna would have used an innocuous word anyplace where he could hear, too.
"Easier times," Susanna said wistfully. "I'll believe that when I see it, too, especially with what's going on now." She wished she hadn't said that as soon as she did; Esther looked on the point of tears. Susanna often talked first and worried about consequences later. When she was younger, she'd thought she would outgrow it. But it seemed to be a part of her. Sometimes that landed her in trouble. Sometimes it proved very valuable. Every so often, it managed both at once. She knew she had to repair the damage here, and did her best: "One way or another, everything will turn out all right."
"I hope so," Esther said, "but I'm sure I don't see how."
"As long as we act the way any other citizens of the Reich would if their rights were being violated, I think we'll do all right," Susanna said.
"If we were any other citizens of the Reich, our rights wouldn't be violated," Esther said. "Not like this, anyhow."
"Not like this, no," Susanna admitted. "But they still would be. That's what the Reich is all about: the government can do whatever it wants, and everybody else has to hold still for it. But people don't. Germans don't, anyway. If it bumps up against them, they bump back."
"Or they get bumped off," Esther said.
Susanna wished she hadn't put it like that, not because she was wrong but because she was right.Or they get bumped off. That had always been the Reich 's answer for everything-and, judging by the past seventy years, a very effective answer it was, too.