In the Presence of Mine Enemies (40 page)

And it was one of those mornings.
Frau
Baumgartner did get to take Dietrich in twenty minutes early, but that did nothing for the general level of peace and quiet, of which Esther saw very little. Every few minutes, another mother would bring in a shrieking baby or toddler. The phone kept ringing at the most inconvenient moments, too.

By the time the lunch break arrived, Esther felt as if she'd worked two whole days, not half of one. As a pediatrician, Dr. Dambach had to have more than an ordinary mortal's share of patience, but he also seemed to be feeling the strain. “I ought to put some brandy in this coffee,” he said, pouring himself a fresh cup.

“I was thinking of asking if you could prescribe something stronger than aspirin for a headache,” Esther said.

“I will if you like,” Dambach answered.

She shook her head. “Thanks, but no. I was only joking—mostly.”

When Irma Ritter came in for the afternoon shift, she said, “How are things?”

“Don't ask!” Esther said. “About the only good thing I can think of to tell you is that the office didn't catch on fire.”

She thought of one more waiting for the bus that would take her home. Maximilian Ebert hadn't come out from the
Reichs
Genealogical Office to confer with Dr. Dambach—and to bother her. And that, she was convinced, was very good news indeed.

 

Wolf Priller walked up to Alicia on the playground. He looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. She looked at him with nothing but suspicion. He had no use for girls, and she had no use for him. Now, though, he wouldn't quit staring. “What do you want?” she demanded after half a minute or so.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“Did the
Führer
really come and talk with your dad, the way people say?”

“Oh, that. Yes, it's true.”

Wolf's blue eyes got wider yet. “Wow,” he breathed, as if she'd become important on account of the news. She supposed she had—to him, anyway. Then he asked, “How come
you
aren't more excited about it?”

Alicia shrugged. “I don't know. I'm just not.” That wasn't the whole truth, or even very much of it. Wolfgang Priller was the last person to whom she wanted to tell the whole truth. The truth was, she didn't know what to think about Heinz Buckliger's call on her father. Before she found out what she was, the visit would have thrilled her as much as it seemed to thrill everybody else.

Now that she knew she was a Jew, the whole structure of the
Reich
—the structure she had loved—disgusted her. (It disgusted her when she remembered, anyhow. Some of the time, she didn't. Then, for a little while, she
was
the good little German she had been and still pretended to be.) But, from what she'd gathered, the new
Führer
didn't seem to be of the same stripe as the ones who'd come before him. Maybe he wasn't quite so bad after all.

Where did that leave her? In confusion, that was where.

Wolf said, “When I told my dad about it yesterday, he said he'd give this finger”—he solemnly displayed the index finger on his right hand—“to be able to sit down with the
Führer
and talk about things.”

“They didn't talk about
things
—not like that,” Alicia said. “They talked about stuff that had to do with my father's work.”

“Even so,” Wolf said. “My dad was
so
jealous. You have no idea how jealous he was. I am, too. I never thought I'd be jealous of a girl, but I am.” And then, as if afraid he'd said too much, he rushed off and savagely booted a football.

Why is he jealous of me?
Alicia wondered.
I didn't meet the
Führer.
My father did
. She had never run into the phrase
reflected glory,
but she was groping her way toward the idea.

Wolf wasn't the only one who wouldn't let her alone. Emma sidled up to her, whispered, “Lucky,” and then scooted off. She'd done that four different times since
hearing the news two days earlier. Alicia counted herself lucky to be alive and safe. Past that, she didn't worry about anything.

Even Trudi Krebs eyed her in a different way. It wasn't approval halfway down the road to awe, the look she got from most of her classmates. She couldn't quite make out what it was. Disappointment? That would have been her first guess.

Why would Trudi be disappointed in her if her father had met the
Führer?
Was Trudi a Jew? Could she be? Alicia knew she couldn't ask, in case the other girl said no.
I'll ask my mom,
she thought.
She'll know, or be able to find out
. Alicia thought Trudi just came from a family of political unreliables. That was almost as dangerous as being a Jew.

Herr
Peukert knew about what had happened to Alicia's father, too, of course.
Herr
Kessler would have made a big fuss about it, till Alicia couldn't stand it any more.
Herr
Peukert didn't do that. He just seemed…interested. Alicia hardly knew what to make of that. It made her want to talk too much. Had her own secrets been less important, she might have.

When she went to wait for the bus that afternoon, she found Francesca there ahead of her, face thunderous with fury.
“Gott im Himmel!”
Alicia exclaimed. “What's the matter?”

“I got a swat from the Beast,” her younger sister answered, looking even angrier than she had already.

Alicia wouldn't have believed she could. “What did you do?” she asked. Francesca, to put it mildly, wasn't the sort who usually got paddled.

“I didn't do anything! Not a single thing!” she burst out now. “She called me up to the front of the class and gave me one anyway, just for the fun of it. I hate her! I'll always hate her!” When she got angry, she didn't fool around. “This isn't a camp with a bunch of Jews in it. It's supposed to be school!”

“You already knew
Frau
Koch was like that,” Alicia said. “Everybody knows it. Why are you so mad now?”

“Because she did it to
me
!”

Alicia started to laugh. She choked it down before it
even began to show. Her sister's outrage was only part of the reason why, and a small part at that. Maybe, at last, she'd found some of the reason people hadn't complained about what the Party did to Jews. Who would complain, when something like that was happening to a small group of other people and not to themselves? That was doubly true because, if they
did
complain, such things
were
all too likely to happen to them.

“It will be all right,” she told her sister. “Remember, you're only stuck with the Beast for a year. It's not forever.”

“It seems like forever!” Francesca often looked for the cloud, not the silver lining. She added, “And then next year I'll probably get
Herr
Kessler.”

She probably would, too. Alicia didn't want to tell her so, especially since that was also when she would find out she was a Jew. How would she react to that? Like Alicia—maybe even more than Alicia—she believed everything she'd learned in school about Jews. She would have to change her mind.

The school bus turned the corner and rumbled toward the stop. Alicia pointed towards it. “Here. We're going home now,” she said. Sometimes distracting Francesca worked better than actually answering her.

 

Heinrich Gimpel had never imagined he could be a celebrity. What occurred to him was a most un-Jewish thought:
O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me
. Celebrity meant visibility. Visibility, in his mind, was inextricably wed to danger.

He was stuck with it, though. Half the analysts in
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters made a point of coming up to him and passing the time of day. Even crusty
Wehrmacht
officers—real soldiers, not just bureaucrats in uniform—unbent around him where they never had before. Some of them—not all, but a surprising number—proved to be pretty good fellows under the crust.

And all because someone stopped at my desk for fifteen or twenty minutes,
he thought dazedly.
People do that all the time. It shouldn't be so important
.

He laughed at himself. Other analysts stopped at his
desk all the time. Officers stopped there every now and again. The
Führer
? The ruler of the Greater German
Reich
and the Germanic Empire? Well, no. The
Führer
didn't pay a call on an ordinary analyst every day.

Some people didn't try to cozy up to Heinrich. Some people turned green with envy instead, and wanted nothing to do with him. He was glad Willi didn't. Willi, instead, made a joke of it. “Me? I'm going to get rich from knowing you. How much do you suppose I can charge for twenty minutes of your time? Fifty Reichsmarks? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?” He ran his tongue across his lips. “You could get a pretty fancy floozy for that kind of money, but plenty of people would sooner see
you
. What do you think of that?”

“I think they'd have more fun with a girl,” Heinrich answered. Willi laughed till he turned red. Heinrich hadn't been kidding.

Willi didn't seem to have noticed the speculative look Ilse had given Heinrich after the
Führer
's visit. Since Heinrich had pretended not to notice it, too, Ilse's dallying with Willi hadn't paused. They were given to enough long lunches to make other analysts grin and nudge one another—but only when they weren't around.

What irked Heinrich about it at least as much as anything else was that he had to cover Willi's phone during those long lunches. He didn't mind dealing with business. That was what he was there for. Dealing with Erika Dorsch was a different story.

“Analysis section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking,” he said after transferring a call from Willi's desk to his own.

“Hello, Heinrich,” Erika said. “I was hoping for my husband. Too much to expect, I suppose.”

If you really want to talk to Willi, why don't you call him when he's likelier to be here?
Heinrich wondered, a little resentfully. He didn't say that out loud. It would only cause trouble. What he did say was as neutral as he could make it: “I'll take a message for you, if you like.”

“In a bit,” she answered. “Where is he?”

They'd gone around this barn before. “At lunch,” Heinrich said.

“He should be back by now, shouldn't he?” Erika said. Heinrich didn't respond to that at all. She asked, “Where did he go?” and then said, “You're going to tell me you don't know. See? I read minds.”

“Well, I don't,” Heinrich said defensively. “I ate at the canteen today.”

“I'm so sorry for you. Wherever he went, did he go there with Ilse?” Erika waited. Again, Heinrich didn't want to answer, either with the truth or with a lie. Her laugh had a bitter ring. “You're too damned honest for your own good, Heinrich.”

Was that true? Heinrich didn't think so. He had, after all, been living under an elaborate lie for more than thirty years. Erika didn't know that, of course. As long as nobody who wasn't also living the lie knew, he could go on with it. He realized he would have to respond, though. He said, “I wish you and Willi weren't having troubles, that's all.” Not only did he mean it, it sounded like an answer to what she'd just said. He could have done much worse.

He could also have done better. Erika's sour laugh proved that. “Wish for the moon while you're at it.”

Heinrich could have laughed even more sourly. When she wished for the moon, the wildest thing she could think of was repairing what had gone wrong between her husband and her. Heinrich's wish would have been not only lunar but lunatic: he would have wished for the chance to live openly as what he was. He knew too well that that wasn't going to happen no matter how hard he wished.

All that went through his mind in what couldn't have been more than a heartbeat. Erika hardly even paused as she went on, “You don't need to wish, do you? You've really got the world by the tail.” He did laugh then. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help himself. That made Erika angry. “You do,” she insisted.

“Not likely,” Heinrich said. He couldn't tell her why, but hoped his voice carried conviction.

Evidently not, for she said, “No? I didn't see the
Führer
paying a call on my dear Willi.”

If anybody had called Heinrich
dear
in that tone of voice, he would have run away as fast as he could. He answered,
“He might have, but I'm the specialist on the United States, and he wanted to find out something about the Americans.” Even that was more than he felt comfortable saying. Along with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he also worshiped Security, a jealous god indeed. But Erika already knew what he did. If she didn't wish Willi would dry up and blow away, she could figure this out for herself.