In the Presence of Mine Enemies (25 page)

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 Tiergarten
was
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 problems
goyim
have 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 were
really
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.”