In the Presence of Mine Enemies (19 page)

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 we
will
do…” He looked most unhappy. “Without a
Führer,
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 natürlich
—our beloved first
Führer
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
Führer
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 Kurfürstendamm. 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 Kurfürstendamm 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
Sturmbannführer
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 Kurfürstendamm. 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 SS
Bonzen
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 SS
Obergruppenführer
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
Obergruppenführer
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.”