In the Presence of Mine Enemies (46 page)

“I don't think we ever tried to do anything,” her mother replied. “We just tried to live our own lives our own way.”

“There has to be more than that,” Alicia insisted. Her mother shook her head. She asked, “Well, why is it just us, then?”

“It's not
just
us,” her mother answered. “The Turks did it to the Armenians; the Germans did it to the gypsies, too; the Americans did it to their blacks. I think it's happened to us so much because we're stubborn about being what we are. We didn't want to worship Antiochus' gods. We had our own God. We didn't think Jesus was anything special. People made us pay for that, too. We want to do what we do, that's all—do it and not be bothered. We don't bother anybody else.”

“It seems like…an awful lot of trouble,” Alicia said hesitantly.

“Well, yes.” Her mother managed a smile. “But we think it's what God wants us to do, too, you know.”

“I suppose so.” Alicia frowned. “How do we know that's what God wants us to do, though?”

“I didn't say we knew. I said we thought so.” Her mother sighed. “I could tell you that's what the Bible says, but if you look through the Bible and pick out this and that, you can make it say anything under the sun. So I'll just say this is what we've thought for all these years, all these generations, ever since before the Maccabees, before Esther and Mordechai. It's a long, long chain of people. The Nazis almost broke it, but they didn't quite. Do you want to let them?”

“No,” Alicia said, “not when you put it like that.” She
had a child's conservatism: things that were should keep on going. And she also had her own strong sense of order, one much like her father's.

“When all you girls find out what you are, we'll be able to do a little more for Chanukah,” her mother said. “You'll all get some Chanukah
gelt
for the eight nights. You're supposed to light candles, too: one the first night, two the second, and so on up to eight. I don't know if we'll ever be able to try that, though. If anybody caught us, it would be the end.”

Hiding. Doing what you could. Remembering what you were supposed to do but couldn't. Maybe one day your descendants would be able to. If they ever could, those were things they would need to know. A long, long chain of people. That was what Alicia's mother had said. Suddenly, Alicia realized she wasn't the last link on the chain. Others would come after her. One day, in the far, far future, there would be as many ahead of her as behind her—if the chain didn't break here.

“I understand,” she whispered. “I really do.”

“Good.” Her mother flipped potato pancakes with an iron spatula. “We make these at Chanukah, too. That's not part of the religion. It's just part of the celebration. And the nice thing is, it's safe, because people make potato pancakes all the time. Nobody particularly notices if you do.”

“Nobody particularly notices if you do what?” Francesca asked from the doorway.

Alicia jumped. Her heart leaped into her throat. How much had her little sister overheard? Enough to send her running to the Security Police because she didn't know what was what? Maybe not, or she wouldn't have asked that particular question. She must have got there just before she spoke up.

Mommy never turned a hair. “Nobody particularly notices if you give somebody a potato pancake before supper,” she said, and scooped out three—one for Alicia, one for Francesca, and one for Roxane. “Be careful with them. They're hot. And Francesca, go get your little sister, so she can have one, too. Yours will cool off in the meantime.”

Away Francesca ran. Alicia shared a secret smile with her mother. They knew something the smaller girls didn't. And it would stay a secret for a while, and then get told. And the chain would go on.

A
S FAR AS
S
USANNA
W
EISS WAS CONCERNED
,
FACULTY
N
EW
Year's parties were as dismal as they sounded. People who often didn't much like one another gathered in a place where none of them particularly wanted to be. They talked too much. They drank too much. They made passes they would have known were hopeless or offensive if they hadn't drunk too much. And they had to show up and go through the ordeal every bloody year, because if they didn't they would hear about it from the department chairman. Franz Oppenhoff had a long memory for those who disdained his hospitality. Such mistakes had blighted careers.

To add insult to injury, he served cheap scotch.

Even if it was cheap, though, it—and the schnapps, and the brandy, and the wine, and the beer—did help loosen tongues. And even if people did talk too much, there was more to talk about than usual. It wasn't just who'd published what in which academic journal, who'd been promoted or passed over, and who was sleeping with which bright and/or beautiful student. This year, for the first time in Susanna's memory and probably for the first time in old man Oppenhoff's, too, people were talking politics.

“This system has grit in the gears, but I am of the opinion that we can clean it up, lubricate it, and make it run smoothly, the way it should,” declared Helmut von Kupferstein, who was a Goethe scholar.

Susanna was of the opinion that von Kupferstein was a pompous ass. He was also thirty centimeters taller
than she was, and kept threatening to drop cigarette ashes in her drink without having any idea he was doing it. She also knew he would never have dared such a thing while Kurt Haldweim was
Führer
. Still, she could say, “I hope we can make things better,” without fearing the Security Police would haul her away five seconds later, and so she did.

Von Kupferstein—he was the sort who insisted on the
von
—nodded ponderously. About a centimeter of ash from the cigarette went flying. Susanna jerked her glass aside just in time. The ash landed on the carpet. She stepped on it. He said, “All things are possible under Heinz Buckliger. ‘He who wishes to uphold the truth and has but one tongue, he will uphold it indeed.'” He looked smug at working in a quotation from
Faust
.

But Susanna, here, couldn't quarrel with him—except about that damned cigarette. “This is a good attitude to have,” she said. “We haven't always been perfectly truthful before. ‘The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.'” That was a quotation, too, from
Mein Kampf
. She couldn't very well go wrong there.

Helmut von Kupferstein nodded in recognition. “Oh, yes. But the National Socialists were up-and-comers then,” he said. “Such things are beneath the dignity of those who actually rule.”

“They haven't been,” Susanna said, and walked away. If he thought indignity was the only thing wrong with lies…! But even that wouldn't have occurred to him a year earlier (or, if it had, he wouldn't have had the nerve to say it). If Buckliger was making people look at the way things were and compare them to the way they ought to be, that was a step forward.

Near the liquor—no great surprise there—Franz Oppenhoff stood pontificating to several professors not clever enough to get away but clever enough to look fascinated at the department chairman's every word. Oppenhoff said, “Some remarkable things have happened this past year: not the least remarkable of which is that they have been allowed to happen.”

“
Jawohl, Herr Doktor
Professor!” three members of the captive audience said at the same time.

“We have been ordered to be free, and so…free we shall be.” Professor Oppenhoff stood there beaming, unconscious of any irony. The junior members of the faculty all but genuflected. That the department chairman didn't know he was being ironic frightened Susanna more than anything else.

And yet, was he so far wrong? All Heinz Buckliger had done was loosen the straps of the straitjacket a little. Susanna didn't think the
Führer
wanted anything more than to make it fit the
Reich
better. But if people started trying to wiggle out of the sleeves, how could he complain? He was the one who'd made it possible in the first place.

Would they really start wiggling? The English proverb was,
Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile
. The
Reich
had taken both inches and miles from Britain, forcing the metric system on it. The point remained. If the
Führer
gave an inch…

Susanna shook her head and went over to the scotch again. If the
Führer
gave an inch, the SS was all too likely to take it away again—and to break your fingers because you'd tried to grab it.

Professor Oppenhoff fixed himself another drink, too. The old boy had to have a liver like a sponge; he could pour down a lot of sauce without showing it. Like an old-fashioned arch-duke, he inclined his head to Susanna. “A good New Year to you, Professor Weiss,” he rumbled, and exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke almost as toxic as mustard gas.

“Thank you, sir. The same to you.” Susanna wondered how she could get away.

“I daresay you approve of the radical changes we have seen lately,” Oppenhoff observed.

There was a not-quite-question that dropped her right in the middle of a minefield. If she denied it, he'd know she was lying. She'd always been as radical as she could be in a police state. If she admitted it, that might come back to haunt her after a crackdown. The calculations you had to make, living in such a state…

“Hard not to approve of anything that lets us inquire more openly into all sorts of things,” she said after no more
than a second's silence. If she kept her answer strictly related to business, it was—she hoped—less likely to seem politically dangerous.

“Inquire more openly?” Professor Oppenhoff pondered that with a judicious puff on the cigar and another cloud of poisonous smoke. “We in the Department of Germanic Languages have never been greatly restricted in our scholarship.”

“Well, no,” Susanna said. Could he be as naive as he sounded? She had trouble believing it. True, the Nazis didn't interfere so much with a professor of Middle English or Gothic or Old High German. But why would they? Susanna's research touched the modern world almost nowhere. If she'd taught sociology or psychology or political science, it would have been a different story. Anthropology? Anthropology was so full of Aryan doctrine, it was hard to tell science—if there was any—from ideology there.

Franz Oppenhoff seemed oblivious to all that. “Inquiry is good,” he said with the air of a man making a large concession. Then his gaze sharpened. “And I congratulate you on placing your recent articles in two most distinguished journals. This brings credit to the whole department.”

“
Danke schön, Herr Doktor
Professor,” Susanna said. “I hope you will agree it also brings credit to me?”

Did Oppenhoff turn red? With all the booze he carried, it was hard to tell. The cigar could have caused his cough. “No doubt it does,” he said without conviction. “Your research is, ah, most original.”

“Thank you again,” Susanna said, though he hadn't meant it for a compliment. She'd undoubtedly written more about the roles of women in literature, for instance, than all the men in the department put together.
Herr Doktor
Professor Oppenhoff would have looked down his nose at that even more than he did—he was an unreconstructed
Küche, Kirche, Kinder
man—if she hadn't repeatedly placed her articles in some of the most prestigious academic publications in the Germanic Empire.

“Modern ideas,” he muttered now. “Well, you are better suited to cope with them than I am. When they say they are going to change the ideology we have lived under for
longer than I have been alive…Is it any wonder I have a hard time working up much enthusiasm?”

“If the change is for the better, we should make it,” Susanna said. She made herself a fresh drink, wishing the scotch would change for the better.

“Yes. If,” Oppenhoff said. “Who knows? Whatever happens, you are bound to see more of it than I do.” With that cheery reflection, he went off to inflict himself on someone else. Susanna took a long pull at the new drink, even if it was nasty. If the Security Police ever found out what she was, the department chairman would outlive her by years.

 

“What's this?” Heinrich Gimpel asked as he and Willi Dorsch got off their bus and started toward
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. The trip in from Stahnsdorf hadn't been much fun. An icy dagger of a wind from off the Baltic—seemingly straight from the North Pole—brought flurries of snow and spatters of freezing rain with it, which made standing at the bus stop an ordeal. Then the bus had had to detour around a wreck the freezing rain had probably caused. And now black-uniformed Security Police stood alongside the usual
Wehrmacht
guards. The
Wehrmacht
men did not look delighted to have company.

“Have you forgotten?” Willi answered. “The
Gauleiter
's going to tell us how
wunderbar
we are this morning.”

“Oh, joy.” Heinrich had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. Rolf Stolle, the Party leader who essentially ran Berlin, was a hard-drinking, womanizing bruiser. If this generation had anybody whose debauchery came close to the legendary Göring's, Stolle was the man. “What he knows about this place would fit on the head of a pin.”

“Well, yes,” Willi said. “But he'll be entertaining. Wouldn't you rather listen to him than stare at spreadsheets?”

The honest answer to that was no. If Heinrich said as much, Willi would laugh at him and call him a greasy grind. He shrugged instead. Willi laughed at him anyway, which meant he knew what Heinrich wasn't saying.

Up at the top of the stairs, the Berlin police scrutinized identification cards before giving them to the usual guards
to run through the reader. The
Wehrmacht
men smirked slightly as they returned the cards to Heinrich and Willi.
These fellows think they're important,
they might have said.
They think so, but they're wrong
.

Signs taped to the walls said,
HEAR ROLF STOLLE IN THE ASSEMBLY HALL
! Heinrich sighed. He really would rather have worked. What did he need with one more tub-thumping Nazi blowhard? But he couldn't take the chance of antagonizing the Party.
If anybody wonders why one of my projects is late, I'll tell the truth, that's all
.

Televisor cameras were set up in the assembly hall. Whatever Stolle said would go out locally. It might even go out all over the
Reich,
all over the Empire. That did not rouse Heinrich's enthusiasm. Broadcast speeches were no more exciting than any other kind.

Rolf Stolle clumped around up on stage. He was a big bald bear of a man, with a wrestler's shoulders and an actor's large, graceful hands. Resignedly, Heinrich sat down in a plushy chair. He wondered if he could fall asleep without being noticed. He closed his eyes in an experimental way. But he was awake. If he hadn't had his morning coffee…He had, though.
Maybe Stolle will put me under
. There was a hopeful thought.

More analysts and officers and secretaries came in, till the front rows were full and the hall nearly so. It wouldn't do for the
Gauleiter
to make a televised speech in front of a lot of empty seats. Stolle took his place behind the lectern. More Security Police stood behind him as bodyguards. Heinrich tried to yawn without opening his mouth. By the way Willi snickered, he might have done better.

“Good morning, gentlemen—and all you pretty ladies, too,” Stolle boomed. A couple of women giggled at his leer. Heinrich's guess was that the luck he enjoyed with them came from his rank, not from his person.
He
certainly wouldn't have wanted that big oaf pawing him. The
Gauleiter
went on, “We are where we are today because of what the
Wehrmacht
has done for the
Reich
. Without our armed forces, Germany would be weak and our enemies strong. With them, we are strong, and our enemies mostly dead.”

Heinrich didn't bother keeping his mouth shut when he yawned this time. How often had he heard such boastful claptrap? More often than he wanted; he knew that. Next, Stolle would talk about how wonderful the National Socialists were.

And he did: “The
Wehrmacht
is the gun, and the Party is the man who aims it. We chose the targets for your might, and you knocked them down one by one. Wise leadership served us well.”

It was all as predictable as the Mass. With fancy uniforms and swastika flags, the Nazis tried to make such ceremonials as majestic as the Mass, too. In Heinrich's private—very private—opinion, they were just bombastic. To most Party
Bonzen,
the two words might have been interchangeable.