In the Presence of Mine Enemies (8 page)

She stopped. She knew she had the textbook definition straight. Up until a little while before, she'd believed every word of it. Part of her still did. The rest…The rest seemed to stand outside of the self she'd had before the night that turned out to be Purim. She felt somehow bigger than she had before that night. Her new self enclosed the old—and who could say how much else besides?

Herr
Kessler drummed the fingers of his right hand against the side of his thigh. “This is correct,” he said, as if he didn't care to admit it. “Now—you will tell me the meaning of the word
noxious
.” He spoke with a certain gloating anticipation. If she were parroting the definition without grasping what went into it, he would make her pay for that.

But she wasn't.
“Jawohl,”
she said again, still at attention. “
Noxious
means disgusting or nasty or poisonous.”

Kessler's fingers drummed on his thigh for another few seconds. Then he gestured peremptorily. Alicia sat down. From the desk beside hers, Emma whispered, “Smarty-pants.”

That whisper wasn't quite quiet enough. “Emma Handrick!” the teacher thundered.

Emma almost knocked over her chair jumping out of it. “
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!”

“Since you enjoy talking so much, you will now tell the class from what source we have the proper definition of the Jew.”

Alicia could have answered. Emma stuttered and stammered and looked up at the ceiling. Paddle in hand, the teacher bore down on her.
“Mein Kampf!”
she blurted in desperation. “It must be
Mein Kampf!
”

Kessler had already begun to swing back the paddle. Ever so slowly, he lowered it. Emma might have made a lucky guess, but she hadn't been wrong.
“Ja,”
the teacher said. “Be seated, and do not speak out of turn any more.”

“
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler.
Danke schön, Herr
Kessler.” Emma sat down in a hurry, as if glad to put the nice, solid chair seat between her bottom and the paddle.

Balked of his prey, Kessler lobbed an easy question to the whole class: “And who wrote
Mein Kampf,
children?”

“Our beloved first
Führer,
Adolf Hitler!” everyone said together.

“That's right. Very good.” The teacher nodded. “If it weren't for Adolf Hitler, the Jews would still be running the world and exploiting the Aryans.” His finger shot out. “Hans Natzmer!” The boy leaped to his feet. Kessler said, “Tell me what
exploiting
means.”

Hans had red hair and freckles that showed ever more plainly as he went pale. Licking his lips, he said, “I am very sorry,
Herr
Kessler, but I do not know.”

Whap!
The paddle struck home, and Hans was sorrier yet. Kessler said, “
Exploiting
means
taking advantage of
. Remember it. You must not merely bleat out your lessons like so many sheep. You must understand them, must un
derstand the fundamental truth in them, down to the depths of your souls.”

Fundamental truth? Alicia wondered about that. Till she'd learned what she really was, she'd accepted everything her teachers taught her. They all said the same things. Her books all said the same things. Didn't that mean they were all true? She'd thought so.

Where she'd believed everything, now suddenly she doubted everything. If what her teachers and the books said about Jews was a lie (and it had to be, because they said Jews were evil, and she refused to believe that about her family and its friends—she knew better), did they lie about everything else, too? Was anything they taught her the truth, anything at all? Did the Earth really go around the sun? Were four and four really eight?

She could find out about that last one. She looked down at her hands. Four fingers on each, her thumbs hidden beneath her palms. Yes, four and four really did make eight. She sighed, a little regretfully. She would have to keep all the arithmetic they'd rammed down her throat.
Too bad,
she thought. It wasn't her favorite subject. Everything else, though…Everything else remained up for grabs.

She had to make another surrender a few minutes later, when
Herr
Kessler went through the day's grammar lesson. She didn't suppose he was lying about that. People did talk the way he said they did, and they did look down their noses at what he said were mistakes.

What she felt after that was a strange mix of exaltation and terror. From now on, she was going to have to figure things out for herself if she wanted to know what was so and what wasn't. She would have to weigh and judge and decide. She would have to try to see what her teachers weren't telling her from what they did say. It wouldn't be easy. She realized that, too.

Beside her, Emma was humming to herself. Alicia didn't think the other girl even knew she was doing it. Would Emma be able to handle something like this? Alicia laughed at the very idea. Emma had the imagination of a potato. She had to believe everything the teachers said, because she couldn't think for herself. Tell her one thing was
true but she had to behave as if another were, and she'd go to pieces like a broken mechanical toy.

Alicia laughed again, perhaps a little cruelly, imagining gears and springs popping out of Emma's nose and ears. That was funny, all right—too funny. “Alicia Gimpel!” the teacher shouted.

Out of the chair. At attention. “
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!”

“Perhaps you would care to tell the whole class what you find so amusing?”

“Nothing,
Herr
Kessler. Please excuse me,
Herr
Kessler.” If he swatted her…Well, if she got punished for small things, maybe no one would notice she deserved to be punished for something enormous.

“Be seated. Keep quiet.”

“
Ja, Herr
Kessler.
Danke schön, Herr
Kessler.”

“Lucky,” Emma whispered as Alicia sat down. Alicia nodded without a word. Most of her mind was far away.
If being a Jew
isn't
bad, why do I deserve to be punished for it?
The more she looked at it, the more complicated it got.

 

Lise Gimpel was chopping cabbage when Francesca came into the kitchen and waited to be noticed. She didn't have to wait long. Her mother put down the knife and said, “Hello, little one. What can I do for you?”

“Can I ask you something, Mommy?” Francesca said seriously.

“Of course you can, dear. What is it?” Lise was especially fond of her middle daughter, though she tried hard not to show it to her children or her husband. Alicia had a clear, cool intelligence very much like Heinrich's. Roxane…Lise smiled. Roxane was a law unto herself. But Francesca reminded Lise of what she'd been like when she was a little girl.

With eight-year-old solemnity, Francesca asked, “What's wrong with Alicia? She's sure been acting funny lately.”

“Has she?” Lise said. “I hadn't noticed.” She didn't like lying to her children. She didn't like it, but she didn't hesitate, either.

“Well, she has.” Francesca rolled her eyes at adult blindness. She looked more like Lise than either of the other
girls, too. Her face was broader than theirs, and her hazel eyes were a compromise between Lise's green and the brown Heinrich had passed on undiluted to Alicia and Roxane.

“Acting funny how?” Lise asked, though she had a pretty good idea.

“She doesn't want to play so much,” Francesca said. “And she just stays in her room looking at books and thinking about things.”

“Well, you know Alicia.” Lise tried to pass it off lightly. “She gets that way sometimes.” That much was true. The oldest Gimpel daughter had developed a series of enthusiasms—collecting seashells was the latest—that consumed her for days or weeks or sometimes months and then vanished as if they'd never been.

But Francesca shook her head. “It's not like that this time. Usually when she gets that way, she wants Roxane and me to get that way, too. She
expects
us to get that way, too, and she gets mad when we don't.”

Lise hid a smile. Francesca wasn't wrong—Alicia did act like that. Another way Francesca was like her mother was that she noticed the way people behaved. Alicia was all too often blind to it. Now Lise did smile, a little sourly. That also came straight from Heinrich. Since Francesca did notice, Lise would have to answer her. She tried another question: “But not this time?”

“Not this time,” Francesca agreed. “I asked her what it was, and she looked at me and she said, ‘Nothing.'” Her mouth twisted. “I don't know what it is, but it's not nothing. I hope she's…I hope she's not in trouble at school and trying to hide it.”

That was the worst thing she could think of. Lise's heart went out to her because it was the worst thing she could think of. “I'm pretty sure you don't need to worry about that,” Lise said. “
Herr
Kessler would let me know if anything were wrong. He's very diligent.” He reminded her at least as much of a policeman as of a teacher, but that was a different story.

She'd succeeded in distracting her daughter, anyhow. “What does diligent mean?”

“It means he takes care of everything that needs taking care of.”

“Oh.” Francesca spread her hands, a gesture of pure frustration. “Well, what
is
wrong with Alicia, then?”

“I don't know. Whatever it is, she'll probably get over it pretty soon,” Lise said.
She'd better get over it pretty soon. If she doesn't, more people than Francesca will notice
. No doubt her own parents had had the same worries, the same fears, over her. And no doubt they'd had good reason to.

Roxane bustled into the kitchen. She greeted Francesca: “Oh, there you are. What are you doing?”

“Talking with Mommy.” Francesca looked down her nose at her little sister.

“What are you talking about?” Roxane wouldn't have recognized a snub if it bit her in the ankle.

“What a nuisance you are,” Francesca said.

“We were not!” Lise said. “You apologize this instant.”

“Sorry.” Francesca sounded anything but.

“Well, what
were
you talking about, then?” Roxane persisted.

“About Alicia,” Francesca said reluctantly.

“Oh.” Roxane nodded. Her hair, even curlier than Alicia's, bounced up and down. “She's been peculiar lately, all right.” She fixed Francesca with a baleful stare. “
Aber natürlich,
you're pretty peculiar yourself.”

“Roxane, you stop that, too.” Not for the first time, Lise Gimpel had the feeling of being in no-man's-land between forces that were going to keep sniping at each other no matter what she did. Sometimes the squabbles among her children were three-sided, which only made her feel completely surrounded. She did her best to sound severe: “Now you say you're sorry.”

“Sorry.” Roxane outdid Francesca in insincerity. Then, happily, she went back to talking about Alicia, who wasn't there to defend herself: “She's been reading those funny Jew books again, and just a little while ago she was talking about how they were still in her room even though they're too easy for her.”

Those funny Jew books
. Streicher's poison had a candy coating that had made it seem tasty to German children for
almost eighty years. Lise remembered thinking the same thing about his books before finding out what she was. Carefully, she said, “Sometimes you most want to look back at something just when you're getting too big for it.”

To her relief, Francesca nodded in agreement to that. “I think the kindergarten rooms are a lot cuter now than I did when I was in them.”

“They aren't cute,” said Roxane, who was in kindergarten now. “They're just…schoolrooms.” She laced the word with scorn.

“But they have all those tiny little desks and chairs and things,” Francesca said. “They're so
sweet
.” She was the sentimental one in the family, another way she took after Lise. Roxane made a horrible face. Francesca made one back at her—she wasn't too sentimental for that.

“Cut it out, both of you,” Lise said. “You're behaving like a couple of Hottentots.” She had no idea how Hottentots behaved, or even if the
Reich
had left any of them alive, but she liked the sound of the name.

Instead of cutting it out, Francesca and Roxane egged each other on. That gave Lise the excuse to shoo them out of the kitchen. If they wanted to drive each other crazy somewhere else, she didn't mind. If they were driving each other crazy, they weren't wondering why Alicia was acting strange.