When the children went out to the schoolyard to play at lunchtime, no one had anything to do with Trudi Krebs. Most of her classmates pretended she wasn't there. Some of them-mostly boys-talked about her as if she weren't there. "Boy, is she going to get it," Wolfgang Priller predicted with a certain gloomy relish. "They'll knock on her door in the middle of the night, and then…" He didn't say what would happen then, but he didn't have to. The other children shuddered in delicious horror. Everybody knew the kinds of things that happened when they knocked on your door in the middle of the night.
Trudi sat all alone on a bench, fighting back tears. Alicia wanted to go over and try to give her what comfort she could. Before finding out she was a Jew, she would have. Now she didn't dare. Being what she was made a coward of her. She hated that, hated herself for hanging back. But she didn't move. She wasn't afraid of getting in trouble herself. She'd been in trouble plenty of times. Putting her family and friends in trouble, though, was a different story. She couldn't do that. And so, biting her lip, she stayed where she was.
Alicia wondered if Trudi would even show up at school the next day. But she did, and the day after that, too, and on through the rest of the week.Herr Kessler seemed surprised. Alicia knew she was surprised. If the knock on the door in the middle of the night hadn't come…well, who could say what that meant?
Esther Stutzman liked to shop, though she didn't treat expeditions to the department store like hunting trips across the veldt the way Susanna Weiss did. For a Berliner who enjoyed seeing what there was to see and spending some money, there was only one place to go: the Kurfurstendamm. Back before the Second World War, lots of rich Jews had lived there-lived there openly, which made Esther marvel. They'd got away with it for years, too, till Kristallnacht, when the broad street turned into a glittering ocean of broken glass.
Nowadays, the Kurfurstendamm still glittered, but with multicolored neon signs and the reflections of the sun off plate-glass windows. People came from all over the Germanic Empire-and from the Empire of Japan and the South American countries as well-to part with their Reichsmarks in style.
Fashions on dummies in the plate-glass windows ranged from coquettish to outrageous, while some were both at once.Before long, Esther thought,Anna will want to wear clothes like that. Her sigh was part horror and part mere sadness at the passage of time.
Last year's turbans, she saw, were out of favor. Hats this year looked like nothing so much as the high-crowned, shiny-visored caps Party and SS bigwigs wore, decorated with brightly dyed plumes sprouting from improbable places. Esther eyed them dubiously. She didn't know if she cared to look like a Sturmbannfuhrer who'd just mugged a peacock.
She paused in front of a telephone booth. The man inside might well have come from South America. He was certainly too swarthy to live comfortably within the Greater German Reich. He hung up, came out of the booth, and tipped his fedora to Esther as he hurried into the milliner's shop.
Fumbling in her handbag, she pulled out a fifty-pfennig coin and went into the telephone booth. A man who'd started towards it turned away in disappointment. He would have to find another place from which to call, not that there weren't plenty of public telephones along the Kurfurstendamm. Esther fed the coin into the slot and dialed the number she needed. The phone rang once, twice…
"Bitte?" a woman said in Esther's ear.
"Guten Tag, Frau Klein," Esther answered. "I have an important message for you."
"I'm sorry, but I'm not inter-" Maria Klein broke off, perhaps recognizing Esther's voice. Esther hoped that was why she stopped, anyhow. After a moment, the other woman said, "Well, go ahead, as long as you've got me on the line."
She had the sense not to name names, just as Esther had had the sense not to call from her own home or from Dr. Dambach's office. If the Kleins' phone was tapped (as it might well be, after Dambach had discovered the two versions of their family tree), technicians could trace the call here-but how much would they gain if they did? Precious little, because Esther intended to leave as soon as she hung up.
"Thank you," she said now. "I just wanted to let you know that there are people who know there are two sets. Isn't that interesting?" She tried to sound bright and cheerful, as a telephone solicitor should.
"This, too?" Maria said. "This, too, on top of everything with the baby?"
"I'm afraid so." In the face of the other woman's bitterness, Esther's good cheer collapsed like a burst balloon.And it's my fault, she thought miserably.Mine-nobody else's. She didn't know how she was going to live with that.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Maria Klein demanded. "Gott im Himmel,what are we supposed to do now?"
She wasn't really asking Esther. And if she was asking God, He'd had few answers for Jews these past seventy-five years. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything," Esther whispered, and hung up. As soon as she left the booth, another woman went in. She hoped the other woman had happier business. She also hoped the other woman, and whoever used the booth afterwards, would cover up all of her own fingerprints.
Esther wanted to find another phone booth and call Walther, to let him know she'd warned the Kleins. She wanted to, but she didn't. Calls into and out of Zeiss were too likely to be monitored. She could have worked out some sort of code phrase to tell him what she'd done, but she didn't want to take the chance today. Such phrases were fine if nobody was likely to be paying close attention. If, on the other hand, someone was trying to build a case…
With a shiver, Esther shook her head. "No," she murmured.
A man gave her a curious look. Susanna would have frozen him with a glare. Heinrich would have walked past him without even noticing the curious look, which would have confounded him just as well. Esther's way was to smile sweetly at him. He turned red, embarrassed at wondering about such an obviously normal person.
If only you knew,Esther thought. But the truth, no matter how little the Nazis wanted to admit it, was that Jews were, or could be, normal people, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Shylock's words from The Merchant of Venice echoed in Esther's mind.If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
Esther tried to imagine an SS man tickling a Jew. The picture was enough to set her laughing without the deed-but only for a moment. The Nazis had poisoned Jews, poisoned them by the millions, and the Jews had died.
Shylock went on,and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? She doubted a Jew was left alive who didn't dream of revenge at least once a day. But dreams were only dreams.
Survival is a kind of revenge,Esther thought.Just by living on, by passing our heritage to our children, we beat the Nazis. She smiled. Now Alicia Gimpel knew what she was, too. Pretty soon, her sisters would also know.
And if all went well-and Esther, with her sunny disposition, still hoped it would-Eduard Klein would find out one of these days, too. But then that smile disappeared. No matter how sunny Esther was, she couldn't keep it. The Kleins had passed on some of their heritage to little Paul, too, and he would never live to find out what he was.
Heinrich Gimpel was starting to get used to seeing long black limousines pull up to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht about the time he and Willi got off their bus in front of the building. He was getting used to watching Party and SSBonzen he'd seen on the televisor and read about in newspapers and magazines climbing the steps he climbed every day.
And he was beginning to gauge how the generals in charge of the Wehrmacht liked their high-ranking visitors by the way the guards treated the newcomers at the entrance. If they came to attention and waved the politicking bigwigs through, those officials were in good odor with his bosses. If they made the muckymucks wait, checked identity cards against faces, and fed the cards through the machine reader to get a green light, those men weren't so well liked.
One morning, the machine reader showed a red light. "This is an outrage!" an SSObergruppenfuhrer shouted. "Let me pass!"
"Sorry," a guard replied, obviously enj
oying being rude to the SS equivalent of a lieutenant general. "No green light, you don't come in." He turned to Heinrich and Willi. "Next!"
"You have not heard the last of this!" the Obergruppenfuhrer warned. He stormed off, his face as red as the stripe on a General Staff officer's trousers.
Heinrich wondered if his identity card would pass muster, but it did. So did Willi's. Once they got inside, Willi said, "The generals really didn't want to see that fellow, if they programmed the reader to reject his card."
"People are starting to show where they stand," Heinrich replied.
"I'd say so," Willi Dorsch agreed. "And if that SS man's faction wins, I'd say we'll see our budget cut."
Heinrich shrugged. "The Waffen — SS has always thought it could do the Wehrmacht 's job. The next time it's right will be the first."
"Not to hear its officers tell the story." Willi shrugged, too. "Ah, well. Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is but to do or die."
"You so relieve my mind," Heinrich said. Willi laughed. He could talk blithely about dying-he didn't have to worry about it very much. Heinrich, on the other hand, had days when he felt he was living on borrowed time, and that it was about to run out. The feeling would have been bad enough had he worried about himself alone. Worrying about the rest of his folk left in the Reich seemed twenty times worse.
As they sat down at their desks, Willi said, "You see, though? It's just like I said. Nobody cares what the limeys did, and nobody's calling a Party congress to pick the next Fuhrer. So much for the precious first edition. The big shots will do the choosing, same as always."
"It does look that way," Heinrich agreed, and did his best not to sound too unhappy in case the room was bugged. "They're taking their time, too."
"They've got to find somebody they can all at least stand," Willi said, which was doubtless true. "That weeds out the zanies and the men who only have a following in one faction."
"So it does." If Heinrich thought,A Party congress would do better still, because then everything would be out in the open, he kept it to himself. Willi was right: no Party congress would choose Kurt Haldweim's successor. That being so, to go on talking about the first edition might mark a man as a dangerous dissident.
He settled in to work. No matter what the Waffen — SS thought, the Wehrmacht was the strong right arm of the Greater German Reich. And no matter who became Fuhrer — even if it turned out to be that belligerent Obergruppenfuhrer 's candidate-the Wehrmacht had to go on. It had to-and it would. Plenty of people like Heinrich Gimpel (though not many of themjust like Heinrich Gimpel) made sure it kept running smoothly.
Willi asked, "Are we on for tonight?"
"The brains of the outfit hasn't told me anything different," Heinrich said, by which he meant Lise. Willi grinned; he sometimes called Erika the High Command in the same way. Carefully, Heinrich added, "We might do better if we don't talk politics too much, though."
Willi's grin slipped. "You know that, and I know that, but whether Erika knows that… Well, we'll find out."
That was what Heinrich was afraid of, but he made himself smile and nod. The date for dinner and bridge alarmed him, so that part of him wished he'd backed out. If Willi and Erika's marriage was blowing up, he didn't want it to blow up in his face. But what would Erika do if he made that too obvious? He didn't want to find out. Getting back to work was something of a relief.
Willi didn't joke any more about Erika being the one who wanted Heinrich over. Heinrich wished he would have. If he was joking about it, he probably wasn't brooding over what it meant. If he wasn't joking…Well, who could say?
They got through the day's work. Canteen rumor was full of talk about the rejected Obergruppenfuhrer. Since Heinrich and Willi had seen that happen, they scored points for eyewitness accounts. Another analyst sighed enviously, saying, "I'd've paid money to watch one of those arrogant so-and-sos head off with a flea in his ear." Several other people nodded.
Rumor also spoke of Bonzen from the Party and from the Navy who had been admitted to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Heinrich tried to read tea leaves from that. All he could see was that the Navy, like the Wehrmacht, was a conservative service. If they were joining with one section of the Party, maybe with an SS faction different from that Obergruppenfuhrer 's…They might be trying to promote a candidate, or they might be trying to block one. Only time would tell.
Heinrich and Willi rode home together. "See you a little before seven," Willi said as he got off the bus. "We can all watch Horst and then get down to cards."
"All right." Heinrich hoped it would be.
Katarina came over to babysit the girls. Kathe was a kid sister, closer in age to Alicia than to Lise. Heinrich suspected she'd been a surprise to her parents. He wished he could ask them even such a nosy question; a drunken truck driver had broadsided their little VW a few years before, and they hadn't survived the wreck. A People's Court gave the truck driver summary justice, but that didn't bring back the Franks.
Tante Kathe fascinated the children. She dyed her brown hair a yellow as artificial as oleomargarine, and sometimes wore styles that looked like what SS uniforms would have been if they were designed to titillate rather than terrify.In my day, you'd have done a stretch in a camp for clothes like that, Heinrich thought. He laughed at himself.And if going on about "In my day…" doesn't make me an old fogy, I don't know what would.
Tonight Katarina had on dungarees of blue American denim, which were almost as scandalous as some of her other clothes. She refused to be ordinary. That was dangerous for a Jew. On the other hand, a fair number of young men and women dressed the way she did, so she had a crowd into which she could blend in.
"Have fun with your bridge," she told Heinrich and Lise. She might have been saying,Have fun with your warm milk and slippers. Kathe's eyes sparkled as she turned to the girls. "While they're gone, we'll havereal fun, won't we?"
"Ja!" Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane chorused, entranced. Every so often, Heinrich wondered whatreal fun consisted of. He'd never found the girls' heads spinning with hashish after Tante Kathe watched them, so he didn't lose sleep over it, but he did wonder.
Getting out of the house felt good, even if it was only for the short jaunt over to the Dorsches'. As Heinrich and Lise got off the bus, she said, "Willi and Erika are lucky to live so close to their bus stop."
Heinrich nodded. "I've thought the same thing." Thinking along with your wife was supposed to be another mark of fogydom. He didn't care. He liked thinking along with Lise.
When he rang the bell, Erika opened the door. She smiled at the Gimpels. "Come on in," she said. "Horst will be on in a minute, and Willi wouldn't miss him for the world." Erika made watching the news sound like a vice.First danger sign, Heinrich thought.
From the front room, Willi's voice rose in excitement: "Come quick, everybody! I think we've got a new Fuhrer! " That sent Heinrich and Lise-and Erika-hurrying to join him.
"Germany, awake!" Horst Witzleben spoke in millions of homes as if he were a close friend. "After long and serious discussions, senior Party, SS, and military leaders have chosen the present minister of heavy industry, Heinz Buckliger, to guide the future of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire. I am proud to be among the first to say, 'Heil Buckliger!'" His arm shot out in the Nazi salute.
Behind him, a new picture appeared on the screen. Heinrich wouldn't have known Heinz Buckliger from the man in the moon. He proved to be a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, with a thick shock of graying blond hair and a toothy smile. "He's so young!" Erika Dorsch said. A moment later, she added, "And handsome, too."
Heinrich didn't know about handsome. Young the new Fuhrer certainly was: younger by far than Kurt Haldweim had been when he began to lead the Reich. "They passed over a lot of senior people to put him in place," Willi said. "The new generation's here at last."
"The new head of the Reich was born in Breslau in 1959," Horst Witzleben said. That made Buckliger more than forty years younger than Haldweim-closer
to two generations than one. The newsreader went on, "He studied economics in Munich, graduating with highest honors from the university there. Before joining the Ministry of Heavy Industry, he served for seven years in the Allgemeine — SS, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer."Captain, Heinrich thought, automatically translating to what he thought of as a real rank. Not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad.
"Once in the Ministry,Herr Buckliger rapidly became known as an efficiency expert," Witzleben said. "He has promised to bring that passion for efficiency to the Reich as a whole. Here is his first statement after his selection."
Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the Fuhrer 's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. "Volk of the Greater German Reich, I accept the role of Fuhrer with pride, but also with great humility," he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. "Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the Reich and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed."
"He sounds all right," Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the Reich on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.
"So he does," Heinrich agreed. "But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose." His first guess for the new Fuhrer 's patron was Lothar Prutzmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.
"All right, now we know," Erika said. "After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?"
"Good idea," Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.
The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, "I wonder what's on the news."
In The Presence of mine Enemies Page 14
