In the Presence of Mine Enemies (4 page)

My bigger family,
Alicia thought. That, she did like. Aunt Susanna and the Stutzmans had always been like family to her. Finding out they really
were
a family of sorts—or at least part of the same conspiracy of survival—was reassuring, in a way.

Susanna turned to Alicia's father. “I'd better get home. I have to teach an early class tomorrow.”

“We ought to go, too,” Esther Stutzman said. “Either that or we'll wait till Anna falls asleep—which shouldn't be more than another thirty seconds—bundle her into the broom closet, and leave without her.” Her daughter let out an irate sniff.

Alicia's mother and father passed out coats. The friends stood gossiping on the front porch for a last couple of minutes. As they chattered, a brightly lit police van turned the corner and rolled up the street toward the end of the cul-de-sac. “They know!” Alicia gasped in horror. “They know!” She tried to bolt inside, away from the eagle and swastika that had suddenly gone from national emblem to symbol of terror.

Her father seized her arm. Alicia had never thought of him as particularly strong, but he held on tight and made sure she couldn't move. The van turned around and went back up the street. It turned the corner. It was gone.

“There. You see?” her father said. “Everything's fine, little one. They can only find out about us if we give ourselves away. Do you understand?”

“I—think so, Father,” Alicia said.

“Good.” Her father let go of her. “
Now
you can go on in and get ready for bed.”

Alicia had never been so glad to go into the house in all her life.

 

Susanna and the Stutzmans walked off toward the bus stop. Heinrich and Lise Gimpel went back inside the house. Once he closed the door, he allowed himself the lux
ury of a long sigh of mingled relief and fear. “That damned police van!” he said. “I thought poor Alicia would jump right out of her skin—and if she had, it might have ruined everything.”

“Well, she didn't. You stopped her.” His wife gave him a quick kiss. “I'm going to make sure she's all right now.”

“Good idea,” Heinrich said. “I'll start on the dishes.” He rolled up his sleeves, turned on the water, and waited for it to get hot. When it did, he rinsed off the plates and silverware and glasses and loaded them into the dishwasher. The manufacturers kept saying the new models would be able to handle dishes that hadn't been rinsed. So far, they'd lied every time.

Heinrich was still busy when Alicia came out for a goodnight kiss. Usually, that was just part of nighttime routine. It felt special tonight.

He said, “You don't have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you're afraid, people will start wondering what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self, and no one will ever suspect a thing.”

“I'll try, Papa.” When Alicia hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her and ran his hand through her hair. “Good night,” she said, and hurried away.

He let out another sigh, even longer than the first. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment's notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. That much, Alicia had given him.

His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the
Ostlands
and other, newer, ones from the USA to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, he would show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would never come, for her sake and his own.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as
the machine started to churn, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. “And so the tale gets told once more,” she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich hung on to his wife. “And so we try to go on for another generation,” he said. “We've outlasted so much. God willing, we'll outlast the Nazis, too. No matter what they teach in school, I don't believe the
Reich
can last a thousand years.”

“
Alevai
it doesn't.” Lise used a word from a murdered language, a word that hung on among surviving Jews like the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. “But, of course, now that the tale is told, the risk that we'll get caught also goes up. You did just right there, keeping her from running when the police van came by.”

“Couldn't have that,” Heinrich said gravely. “But she'll be nervous for a while now, and she's so young….” He shook his head. “Strange how the worst danger comes from making sure we go on. No one would ever suspect you or me—”

“Why else buy pork?” Lise broke in. “Why else have a Bible with the New Testament in it, too? Because we'd have to want to commit suicide if we used one that didn't, that's why.”

“I know.” Heinrich knew more intimately than that: he still had his foreskin. He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and set the spectacles back on his nose. “We do everything we can to seem like perfect Germans. I can quote from
Mein Kampf
more easily than from Scripture. But it's not so easy for a child. I remember.”

Lise nodded. “So do I.”

“And we still have two more to go.” Heinrich let out yet another sigh. He hugged her again. “I'm so tired.”

“I know,” she said. “It must be easier for me, staying home with the
Kinder
like a proper
Hausfrau
. But you have to wear the mask at the office every day.”

“Either I pretend to others I'm not a Jew or I pack it in and pretend the same thing to myself. I can't do that, dammit. I know too much.” He thought again of the hidden, yellowing black-and-white photographs from the east, and of the color prints from North America. “We
will
go on, in spite of everything.”

His wife yawned. “Right now, I'm going on to bed.”

“I'm right behind you. Oh—speaking of the office, on the way home today Willi said he admired how content I was here and now.”

“Did he? Good,” Lise said at once. “If you must wear the mask, wear it well.”

“I suppose so. He also asked if we were busy tonight. I said yes, since we were, but we'll be going over there one evening soon.”

“I'll arrange for my sister to stay with the girls,” Lise said. “Let's give Alicia a little more time to get over her shock before we take her out. And she'll realize Katarina's one of us, too, and maybe talking with her will help.”

“Sensible. You usually are.”

“Ha!” Lise said darkly. “I'd better be. So had you.”

“I know.” Heinrich chuckled. “Besides, with the girls at home we'll be able to play more bridge—we won't have to ride herd on them.”

“That's true.” Lise also laughed. Both of them, by now, were long used to the strangeness of having good friends who, if they learned the truth, might well want to send them to an extermination camp. Heinrich
was
looking forward to getting together with Willi and Erika Dorsch for an evening of talk and bridge. Within the limits of his upbringing, Willi was a good fellow.

Heinrich pondered the limits of his own upbringing, which were a good deal narrower than Willi Dorsch's. In one way, telling Alicia of her heritage was transcending those limits. In another, it was forcing them on her as well. In still another…He gave up the regress before he got lost in it. “Didn't you say something about bed?”

“You're the one who's been standing here talking,” Lise said.

“Let's go.”

 

When her mother shook her awake, Alicia had to swallow a scream. Evil dreams had filled her night, dreams of being a monster in a world full of ordinary people, dreams of being taken from her parents, dreams of being taken from her parents to a place from which she would surely never
return, dreams of…. She didn't remember all of them. She hoped she would forget the ones she did remember.

In the instant when her eyes came open, she thought the hand on her shoulder belonged to a man from the Security Police. The scream turned to a gasp of relief as she recognized her mother. “Oh,” she said. “It's you.”

“Did you think it would be anyone else?”

“Yes,” Alicia said.

The one flat, stark word wiped the smile from her mother's face. “Oh, little one,” she said, and hugged Alicia. “Now get up and go eat your breakfast—and remember, your sisters don't know, and they mustn't know.”

“How am I supposed to hide it?” Alicia asked.

“You have to, that's all,” her mother said, which was no help at all. “Now get up and wash your face and eat breakfast and brush your teeth. You've got to be ready when the school bus gets to the stop.”

That scream wanted to come out again. Alicia couldn't imagine how she'd get through the day without revealing herself to her teacher and, even more appallingly, to her friends. But she had to try. She'd learned to swim when her father tossed her into a stream and she had to claw her way back to him or drown. So she'd thought at the time, anyhow, though of course he would have saved her if she'd got in trouble.

But if she got in trouble here, no one would save her. No one could save her. She didn't know much about being a Jew, but that seemed all too clear.

She wanted to stay in bed. She wanted to stay in bed forever, in fact. She couldn't, and she knew it. Her mother had already gone down the hall to wake Francesca and Roxane. And there was Francesca, mumbling and grumbling. She hated to get up in the morning. Given half a chance, she would have slept till noon every day.

Alicia got out of bed a moment before her mother reappeared in the doorway and said, “Get moving,” and then, “Oh. You are.”

“Yes, Mama.” Being a Jew meant trouble. Alicia could see that. But being late to school meant trouble, too, trouble of a sort she'd known about for years. That trouble she
could stay out of. The other…? To Alicia, they both seemed about the same size just then. She was ferociously bright, but she was only ten.

She ducked into the bathroom as her sisters came out of the bedroom they shared. They would camp in the hall waiting for her, so she hurried. When she opened the door again, she pushed past them and back into her room to get dressed. That meant she didn't have to say anything much to them for a little while longer.

Like any ten-year-old girl, she put on the tan blouse and skirt that were the uniform of the
Bund deutscher Mädel
. She remembered how proud she'd been when she turned ten the summer before and could join the League of German Maidens like Anna and her other older friends. Putting on the uniform, with its swastika armband, was a sign she was growing up.

As she pulled up her white socks and tied her stout brown shoes, though, the uniform suddenly seemed a lie, a betrayal.
I'm not a German maiden,
she thought unhappily.
I'm a Jewish maiden
. She shivered, though a steam radiator kept her room cozy and warm.

On her bookshelves stood a children's classic from the early days of the
Reich,
Julius Streicher's
Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath
. Like millions of German youngsters across three generations, she'd learned the difference between Aryans and Jews from the slim little volume. The blond, handsome, muscular Aryan could work and fight. The pudgy, swarthy, hook-nosed, flashily dressed Jew was the greatest scoundrel in the
Reich
. Alicia had believed that with all her heart. It was in a book—in every book. How could it be wrong?

Aryan children with blond or light brown hair jeered as homely, black-haired Jewish children and a Jewish teacher were ousted from their school. A few pages later, an Aryan boy grinned and played a concertina while more ugly Jews with big noses and fleshy lips trudged into exile past a sign that said
ONE-WAY STREET
. The colorful pictures were so bright and cheerful, they commanded belief. Alicia had the companion volume,
The Poison Mushroom,
too.

She stared at the caricatures of the Jews. She didn't look
like that, nor did her sisters and parents. The Stutzmans and Susanna Weiss didn't, either. Realizing that helped steady her. If
Trust No Fox
had one lie in it, maybe it had lots of lies in it. With all her heart, she hoped so.

“Alicia!” her mother called. “Hurry up! It's breakfast!”

“Coming!” she said, and put the book away.

“Slowpoke,” said Roxane, who with Francesca was already digging in to sausages and eggs. She was the teaser in the family, always looking for ways to get under her older sisters' skins and usually finding one.