She couldn't so much as fast on Yom Kippur.Don't do anything to get yourself noticed was a Jew's unbreakable rule. If, say, Roxane asked,Why aren't you eating, Mommy? — how could she answer? Whatever she said, her daughter might tell a school friend she'd stayed hungry all day long. If that reached the wrong ears…Even so small a thing could mean disaster.
And so she ate breakfast with everybody else, and silently apologized to God. Heinrich, no doubt, was doing the same thing. By the somber expression on Alicia's face, so was she. Lise had told her what the holidays were and what they meant and how they were supposed to be celebrated if only that were possible. Francesca and Roxane ate pancakes and sausage without the slightest idea that today was different from any other day.
Heinrich got to his feet and grabbed his attache case. "I'm off," he said. "I'll see you all tonight." Collecting kisses all around, he hurried out the door. It closed behind him. Lise sighed and smiled at the same time. She didn't worry about him running off with Erika Dorsch or anybody else, even if she teased him. He wasn't the sort to leave unfinished anything he started. If his eyes sometimes wandered-well, he was a man. His hands and, more to the point, his heart didn't.
"Come on, eat up," Lise told the girls. "Then get out of your nightgowns and into school clothes. I know you don't have to leave as early as Daddy does, but you can't lie around eating grapes all day, either."
She got giggles from the younger two girls and a disdainful sniff from Alicia, who said, "You've used that one before, Mommy."
Lise wasn't about to put up with literary criticism before eight in the morning, especially when she hadn't finished her coffee (the biggest advantage she saw to not fasting on Yom Kippur was that she didn't have to miss it). She said, "I don't care whether I have or not. It's still true. Get moving."
Alicia was the one she had to bully, the one a bird or a book or anything else might distract from the business at hand. Francesca could barely grunt before ten, but she did what she had to do on automatic pilot. Roxane liked mornings, probably because her sisters didn't.
Lise got them out the door in good time. She always did, and she always breathed a sigh of relief once they were gone, too.Especially today, she thought. The Day of Atonement she wanted to herself. Had things been different, gathering with her fellow Jews would have been sweet. But, though they got together on minor holidays like Purim, they didn't dare meet on the big ones. Someone might be watching, might be listening, might be wondering. You never could tell.
She sat down in front of the televisor. It was off. She left it off, too. She didn't want any distractions, not while she was doing her best to forgive the people who'd troubled her during the past year. In spite of her earlier forgiving thoughts about Heinrich, she wasn't surprised when Erika rose to the top of the list. Lise's smile was slightly sour. Erika couldn't help being what she was, any more than a tiger could.
Things around a tiger had a way of ending up dead. Things around Erika…
Methodically, Lise went through the rest of the list, starting with Herr Kessler, who'd vexed her because he vexed Alicia, and ending with the cleaner who had returned a linen blouse with a scorch mark and without two buttons. Then she took on the hard one she attempted every Yom Kippur: to forgive the German people.
She'd never done it, not in her heart. She'd never even come close, and she knew it. That wasn't only because their crimes were so enormous, either. Worse, they had no idea they'd committed crimes. They were convinced they walked the path of truth and justice and righteousness. If they didn't see they had anything to atone for, what was the point to forgiving them? Was there any? Not that she'd ever been able to see.
This year…This year, for the first time since she was a girl, she wondered. Heinz Buckliger seemed to have some idea that the Reich and the Volk of the Reich didn't come to their dominant position in the world with hands perfectly clean. If the Fuhrer thought the German people stood in need of atonement for some things…Well, how much did that mean?
Buckliger hadn't said a word about Jews, not in his speech on the televisor and not in anything else Heinrich and Walther had been able to uncover. But he had cast some doubt on the overwhelming importance of Aryan blood. And how much didthat mean?
"I want to hope," Lise murmured, to herself and possibly to God. "It's been so long. Iwant to hope."
Willi Dorsch glowered in mock severity-Heinrich Gimpel hoped the severity was mock, anyway-as he climbed aboard the bus that would carry Heinrich and him to the Stahnsdorf train station. He sat down next to Heinrich and demanded, "Well, what have you got to say for yourself?"
Did he know? Had Erika been as forthright as she often was? Or had he just added two and two and come up with-surprise! — four? If he did know, he was going to have to come out and say so. "Well, how does 'good morning' sound?" Heinrich answered.
"It'll do." With a grin, Willi thumped him on the back. "Better than a lot of things you could have told me."
"I'm so glad." Heinrich hoped irony would keep Willi from noticing he was telling the exact and literal truth. Having got away with one question, he tried another: "And how are you today?"
"I could be worse. I have been worse. I probably will be worse again before too long," Willi answered. Heinrich concluded he and Erika hadn't fought during the night. The way things had been going with them, that was indeed something. His friend went on, "How about yourself?"
"Me? I just go on from day to day," Heinrich said. That was true enough. Getting through the High Holy Days every year reminded him of just how true it was.
"Just go on from day to day," Willi repeated, and sighed gustily. "Christ, I wish I could say the same. I never know if tomorrow will blow up in my face."
Neither do I,Heinrich thought.And you're talking about your marriage. I'm talking about my life. He'd grown very used to thinking things he couldn't say. What he could say was, "I hope everything turns out all right."
"You're a good fellow, you know that?" Willi sounded a little maudlin, or maybe more than a little, as he might have after too much to drink. But this morning he didn't smell like a distillery, and he didn't wince at every noise and every sunbeam like a man with a hangover. Maybe he really was just glad to have a friend. And how glad would he be after a few ill-chosen words from Erika?
Those words evidently hadn't come. Maybe they wouldn't. Heinrich dared hope. In the Reich, the mere act of hoping was-had to be-an act of courage for a Jew. With a shrug, Heinrich said, "All I know is, I've got too much work waiting for me at the office."
"Ha! Who doesn't?" Willi said. "Our section could have twice as many people in it, and we'd still be behind. Of course, if the new Fuhrer cuts the assessments in the Empire the way he's been talking about, we'll all end up out of work."
"Do you think he will?" Heinrich asked with even more genuine curiosity than he dared show.
"Me? I'm not going to try and guess along with him any more, no, sir," Willi said. "I was wrong a couple of times, and all that proves is, I shouldn't do it."
The bus pulled into the train station. Heinrich and Willi hurried off. They both paused to buy copies of the Volkischer Beobachter from a vending machine, then went to the platform to catch the commuter train into Berlin.
They sat side by side, reading the paper. Heinrich, as usual, went through it methodically. Willi was a butterfly, flitting from story to story. He found as many interesting tidbits as Heinrich did, and sometimes found them faster. "Americans question assessment," he said, pointing to a piece on page five.
Heinrich, who hadn't got there on his own yet, flipped to the story. He read it, then shook his head. "They can question, but it won't do them much good," he said. "The occupying authorities will collect their pound of flesh one way or another."
"Ah, a pound of flesh." Willi laughed wistfully. "I remember how much fun that used to be."
Heinrich winced at the pun. Maybe that wince was what made him ask, "What about Ilse?" Normally, he would think such a thing, but he wouldn't
say it. The wry joke had made him drop some of his defenses. He didn't like that. He couldn't afford to drop them, even for an instant.
Willi blinked. He hadn't expected the question, any more than Heinrich had expected to ask it. After a pause when Heinrich wondered if he would answer at all, he said, "Ilse's sweet, and she's good in bed, but it's not the same, you know what I mean?"
"I…think so," Heinrich said. He thought about making love with a near-stranger after so long with Lise and nobody else. Yes, that would be very odd, especially the first few times. Then he thought about making love with Erika, who was, after all, anything but a stranger. What wouldthat be like?Cut it out, he told himself sternly. Most of him listened.
"You're lucky, being happy where you are," Willi said, and dove back into the newspaper.
"Yes, I suppose I am," Heinrich said, which was certainly the truth, for he would have been stuck where he was whether he was happy or not. Divorce drew notice to a couple, even these days. Jews mostly stayed married no matter how badly they got along.
A lot ofgoyim did the same thing. Willi said, "If it weren't for the kids, and if it weren't for the way people look at you funny afterwards, Erika and I would have split up by now. Hell, we may yet, in spite of all that stuff."
"I hope not," Heinrich said, which was true for all kinds of reasons his friend didn't understand. He chose one Willi would: "If you guys broke up, we'd have to find somebody else to beat at bridge."
"Ha! Whathave you been smoking?" That touched Willi's pride where a lot of other gibes wouldn't have. And if he thought of Heinrich as a rival at the card table, maybe he wouldn't worry about him any other way.
The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi rode the escalators to the upper level, where they caught the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Heinrich went to his desk with more than a little apprehension-not only because now he knew Willi was sleeping with Ilse, but also because the Americans were acting up. When they did that, they made his job harder. He had enough other things to worry about without trouble from the far side of the Atlantic.
But sure as hell, four people came up to him in the first hour he was there, all of them with the Beobachter in their hands. They all wanted to know what the Yankees would do, and what the Reich would do to them after they did it. "We'll have to wait and see," Heinrich said again and again, which satisfied no one.
He said the same thing to two more men on the telephone. One was a lieutenant general, a man who disliked ambiguity of any sort. "Dammit, I need to know if we're going to move or not," the officer growled.
"So do I, sir," Heinrich answered. The general swore and hung up.
When the telephone rang again, Heinrich felt like swearing, too. "Budget analysis-Gimpel speaking," he said.
"Good morning to you,Herr Gimpel. This is Charlie Cox, calling from Omaha." The American's German was fluent, but had the flat accent English-speakers gave the language.
"I know your name,Herr Cox. You are in the Department of the Treasury,nicht wahr? What can I do for you today?"
"You can tell me how serious Herr Buckliger is about a new deal for the different parts of the Germanic Empire." Cox didn't beat around the bush. And that, of course, would bethe question in the eyes of any American administrator.
It was alsothe question, or at least closely related tothe question, in Heinrich's eyes. It happened to be one he couldn't answer, either for Charlie Cox or for himself. "I'm very sorry,Herr Cox," he said, and meant it. "I don't make policy. I just implement it when someone else has made it."
Cox grunted. "Well, I don't suppose I really could have expected you to say anything else. But you've got to have some kind of idea about how things will work out. You're a hell of a lot closer there than we are here."
"If I knew, I would tell you," Heinrich answered, and he might even have meant that. "But I'm afraid I don't. The person who sets policy, whom I mentioned a moment ago, is the Fuhrer, no one else. When he decides what he wants to do, we will do it."
"Do it to us," Cox muttered in English. Heinrich was less fluent in that language than, say, Susanna Weiss, but he spoke it well enough. Even though the Empire ran on German, English came in handy for dealing with Americans. Charlie Cox had just put his life in Heinrich's hands.
"Sooner or later, we will all see what the Fuhrer has in mind," Heinrich said. While true, that was unlikely to be comforting. "In the meantime, I suggest you pay your assessments promptly. That way, there won't be any unfortunate incidents both sides might regret."
"Incidents we would regret a hell of a lot more than the Reich does." Cox dared say that in German.
"Probably," Heinrich agreed. "The losing side does have a way of regretting incidents more than the winners."
"If we didn't know that already,Herr Gimpel, the past forty years would have proved it to us," Cox said. "Auf wiedersehen." He hung up.
From his desk a couple of meters away, Willi Dorsch asked, "The Americans?"
Heinrich nodded. "Oh, yes. Did you expect anything else? They want to see how much they can get away with, too."
"Who doesn't, these days?" Willi said. "If we had any Jews left, they'd be trying to persuade us they were good Aryans, too." He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.
Heinrich laughed, too. But the shriek inside didn't go away. One of these days, he would have an ulcer-or a stroke. A stroke had killed his father. Things came back to haunt you one way or another.
Ilse set some envelopes and a small package on his desk. "Morning mail delivery,Herr Gimpel," she said.
"Thank you," he answered, hardly looking up.
She went over to Willi's desk and gave him the same sort of stuff. "Here's yours, Willi," she purred in a bedroom voice.
"Thanks, sweetie." He made as if to grab her. Laughing, she spun away.
Heinrich punched keys on his calculator with altogether needless violence.If you're going to have an office romance, can't you at least pretend you're not? he wondered.It makes life easier for everyone around you-especially people who know your wife.
A moment later, another question crossed his mind.Am I angry at Willi, or am I just jealous? He shook his head. He didn't want Ilse. But the idea of having his choice between two women he did want…He shook his head again, annoyed at himself for poking beneath the surface. Purely in the abstract-or so most of him insisted-he liked that idea pretty well.Maybe I am jealous of Willi after all.
Alicia Gimpel liked the idea of a new year that began around the end of summer, a new year that corresponded to the beginning of the new school year. She liked it so well, she wished she could talk about it with her sisters and her friends. But her mother and father had both warned against that. "You never can tell who might be listening, or what they might know," her father had said. She could see how that made sense, but she didn't like it.
On the day the new school year started, she and everybody else who'd put up with Herr Kessler seemed happy enough even without a real New Year's celebration. At the bus stop, Emma Handrick said, "I feel like they just let me out of a camp. Whatever happens now, it can't be worse."
"He was awful, all right," Alicia agreed. She turned to Francesca, who stood close by. With a big-sisterly combination of concern and sadism, she said, "Maybeyou'll have him next year."
"You're mean!" Francesca said shrilly. "I've got Frau Koch this year. Isn't that bad enough?"
"Getting stuck with the Beast is pretty bad, all right." Alicia spoke with sincere but detached sympathy. She hadn't been unlucky enough to have Frau Koch herself.
Emma said, "I wonder what this Herr Peukert is like. He's new. Nobody knows anything about him yet." The noise of a motor made her look down the street. She nodded to herself-the bus was coming. "Whatever he's like, he can't be worse than Kessler." She spoke with the conviction of someone who'd been paddled more often than she thought she should have.
The schoolyard held more confusion than usual that morning, with students lining up in front of unfamil
iar rooms-and with new kindergartners not sure they should line up at all. Their teachers came out early and shouted them into place. Alicia smiled at the little kids from the height of just-turned-eleven. It had, of course, been a million years ago whenshe had so little idea of what to do. Even Roxane was starting first grade now.
"Guten Morgen, Kinder."A man's voice close by made Alicia forget the kindergartners and her little sister, too.
"Guten Morgen, Herr Peukert," she said, along with the rest of the fifth-graders in her line. Somebody-she couldn't see who-said, "Guten Morgen, Herr Kessler," out of habit. That drew a few giggles from children close by, but the chorus must have drowned it out for the new teacher, since he didn't react.
Alicia sized him up. He was very tall-within a couple of centimeters of two meters. Was he taller than her father? She thought so. The resemblance ended with height.Herr Peukert was blond and bronzed and broad-shouldered. He held himself so straight, he might have had a ramrod in place of his spine.
Behind Alicia, Emma breathed, "Oh! Isn't he gorgeous?"
Under the new teacher's ice-blue stare, several of the boys in line tried to stand straighter themselves. Before taking the class inside, Peukert called off names from the roll book he carried. He looked at the students as they answered, matching faces to names. Alicia looked back steadily when he came to hers. She wasn't thinking of herself as a Jew just then, only as somebody wondering what the next year-a very long time for a fifth-grader-would be like.
"Here!" Emma said when Herr Peukert called her name next. Her voice held a funny catch Alicia had never heard in it before. She looked back over her shoulder. Emma was gazing at the new teacher with what could only be adoration. Alicia had never before found a recognizable thing to go with the word. Now she did.
When Herr Peukert finished calling the roll, he led the class into the room. The children sat down in the same alphabetical order they'd used to take their places in line. Then they rose to give the flag the Party salute and to call out, "Heil Buckliger!" Daily rituals accomplished, they sat down again.
In The Presence of mine Enemies Page 26
