In The Presence of mine Enemies

by Harry Turtledove

  Mothers talked in the waiting room, though thanks to their children she could hear them only fitfully. She did prick up her ears when Rolf Stolle's name came up. The woman who mentioned him wasn't talking about politics, though, or not exactly. If what she said was true, Stolle had made a pass at her sister. From everything Esther had heard, her sister was far from unique.

  "That's not good," another mother said. Her toddler made a swipe for her glasses. She blocked the little arm with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it many times before. "That's not good, either, sweetheart," she told the boy, and then went back to politics: "Still, even if he does make passes at everything in a skirt, he won't send the blackshirts out to knock your door down in the middle of the night. Which counts for more?"

  "Sometimes we need the Security Police," yet another woman said. "Look how they found a Jew a while ago. In this day and age, a Jew sneaking around in Berlin! If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would."

  All the women in the waiting room nodded. Esther had to nod, too. Someone might be watching her, wondering about her. Heinrich's arrest had made the papers and the radio and televisor. No one had said a public word about his release. As far as people knew, the blackshirts were doing their job, keeping Berlin and the Reich Judenfrei and safe from all sorts of Untermenschen. As far as people knew, that was an important job.

  People didn't know as much as they thought they did. Esther wished she could tell them that. But they wouldn't listen, except for the ones who'd report her to Lothar Prutzmann's henchmen. Too bad. Too bad, but true.

  A woman came out of an examination room leading a blond four-year-old boy by the hand. Esther made arrangements for a follow-up visit in a week, then called to one of the women in the waiting room: "You can bring Sebastian in now,Frau Schreckengost."

  "About time!" Frau Schreckengost sniffed. "My appointment was for fifteen minutes ago, after all."

  "I'm so sorry," Esther lied-Frau Schreckengost, a doughy, discontented-looking woman, was the one who'd said Germany needed the Security Police. "Dr. Dambach has to give all his patients as much time as they require."

  "And keepme waiting,"Frau Schreckengost said. As far as she was concerned, the world revolved around her, with everyone else put in it merely to dance attendance upon her.

  And if that didn't make her a typical German, Esther couldn't think of anything that would.

  Susanna Weiss turned on the news. She'd timed it perfectly. The computer graphics of the opening credits were just dissolving into Horst Witzleben's face. "Good evening," the newsreader said. "The Fuhrer today submitted an absentee ballot to the voting chairman of his precinct, as did his wife." The televisor showed Heinz Buckliger and his wife, a skinny blond woman named Erna, handing sealed envelopes to a uniformed official who looked slightly overwhelmed at having so much attention focused on him.

  Witzleben went on, "The absentee ballots are necessary because the Buckligers will not be in Berlin for the election next week. They are going on holiday at the Croatian island of Hvar. Except for a ceremonial meeting with the Poglavnik of Croatia, they have no events scheduled for the time when they will be away, though it is expected that the Fuhrer will offer some comment on the results of the upcoming election."

  He disappeared again. This time, the shot cut to Tempelhof Airport, where the Buckligers were shown boarding Luftwaffe Alfa. The big, specially modified jet airliner taxied down the runway and lumbered into the air. As usual, fighters escorted it to its destination.

  "In other news," Horst Witzleben said, "the Gauleiter of Berlin continued to call for accelerated reform." There was Rolf Stolle, shouting away from the second-floor balcony of the Gauleiter 's residence to a few hundred people in the small square below. The scene seemed to Susanna a parody of the Fuhrer delivering an address to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Adolf Hitler Platz.

  But, as she realized when she'd watched a little more, it wasn'tjust a parody. It was also a comment, and a barbed one. Pounding his fist and bellowing up there on his little balcony with the old-fashioned iron railing (even rusty in places), Stolle made a genuine human connection with his audience. No Fuhrer since Hitler had been able to do that. The Reich and the Germanic Empire had grown too overwhelmingly large. By the nature of his job, the Fuhrer talked at people, talked down to them. Rolf Stolle reminded them what they were missing.

  Of course, if he ever moved to the Fuhrer 's palace, he would have to behave as Himmler and Haldweim and Buckliger had before him. Behaving that way was part of what being the Fuhrer involved. Maybe Stolle didn't realize that yet. Maybe he did, but didn't want anyone else to know he did. Susanna wondered which would be more dangerous.

  The Gauleiter got less air time than the Fuhrer. Horst Witzleben soon cut away to dramatic footage of an industrial accident in Saarbrucken. A helicopter plucked a workman out of what looked like a sea of flames. More than a dozen other Germans hadn't been so lucky. "Along with the Aryans, an unknown number of Untermenschen also perished," Horst said, and went on to the next story.

  Laborers from Poland or Russia or the Ukraine or Serbia or Egypt who'd been lucky enough to be chosen to stoke furnaces or clean chemical tanks or do some other work too hard or too nasty for Aryans and do it till they dropped instead of going to the showers right away…This was their epitaph: one sentence on the evening news. It was more than most of their kind would ever get, too.

  With a shiver, Susanna turned off the televisor. If they'd decided Heinrich was a Jew, he would have needed a miracle to get sent to one of those man-killing jobs. The powers that be would probably have just given him a noodle and gone on about their business. And there was no doubt at all about what would have happened to his girls. They were too young to do any useful work, and so…

  "And so," Susanna muttered. She went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of Glenfiddich into a glass. She almost knocked it straight back, but that was a hell of a thing to do to a single-malt scotch.Ice? she wondered, and shook her head. She was chilly enough inside anyhow. She sipped the smoky, peat-flavored whiskey. Its warmth, dammit, couldn't reach where she was coldest.

  That didn't stop her from topping up the drink a little later on. Put down enough and it would build a barrier against thought. She wasn't often tempted to get drunk, but that one dispassionate sentence on the news had gone a long way toward doing the trick. Heinz Buckliger talked about disclosing and ending abuses. Did he even begin to know what all the abuses in the Reich were? Susanna had begun to hope so. Now all her doubts came flooding back again.

  The telephone rang. Her hand jerked-not enough, fortunately, to spill any scotch. "Who's that?" she asked God. God wasn't listening. When was the last time He'd ever listened to a Jew? It rang again. She walked over and picked it up."Bitte?"

  "Professor Weiss? Uh, Susanna?" A man on the other end of the line, a nervous-sounding man.

  "Yes? Who is this?" Not a student, whoever it was. No student would have had the nerve to call her by her first name, even hesitantly.

  "This is Konrad Lutze, Susanna."

  "Is it?" she said. "Well, this is a surprise. What can I do for you, uh, Konrad?" She had almost as much trouble using his first name as he'd had with hers.

  She really did wonder what he wanted, too. Something to do with her work? With his work? With department politics? She tried to steer as clear of those as she could. With national politics? If he thought she was going to talk about those on the telephone, he had to be a little bit crazy, too. She wasn't anywhere near sure that was safe.

  But after a couple of hesitant coughs, he said, "I was, uh, wondering if you would, uh, like to go to dinner and the cinema with me on Saturday night. That new thriller is supposed to be very good."

  Susanna's mouth fell open. After her unfortunate experience with the drunk, she'd largely sworn off the male half of the human race. Because she was what she was, eligible bachelors were few and far between for her, and she hadn't thought he was eligible enough once she found ou
t how he poured it down. (He, meanwhile, had married and was the father of a baby boy. Some people weren't so fussy as she was. From everything she'd heard, he still drank like a fish.)

  How long had the silence stretched? Long enough for Konrad Lutze to say, "Hello? Are you still there?"

  "I'm here," she answered. "You…startled me, that's all."

  "What do you say?" he asked. "We would have things to talk about, anyhow. That is not so bad-do you know what I mean? If I go out with someone I just happened to meet, and she says, 'So, what do you do?' and I answer, 'I am a professor of medieval English at Friedrich Wilhelm University,' where do I go from there? Her eyes glaze over. I have never yet met a nurse or a librarian or a salesgirl who gave a damn about Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

  "I believe that." Giggling would have been rude, no matter how much Susanna wanted to. Being a Jew made her feel so alone in the world, it had hardly occurred to her that being a professor of medieval English literature could do the same thing. She did believe Konrad Lutze. Not many ordinary people would care about Piers Plowman.

  "Will you, then?" Now he seemed almost pathetically eager.

  Will I, then?Susanna asked herself. Every so often, Jews did fall in love with gentiles. Most of them stopped being Jews almost as completely as if the blackshirts had carted them away. Dinner and a film weren't falling in love, not by themselves. But, by the way Lutze talked, he hoped that was how things would work out. And Susanna wasn't interested in anything that didn't have a good chance of turning serious.

  So…would she, then? Could she even imagine being serious about a gentile? (Whether she could imagine being serious about Konrad Lutze seemed an altogether different, and much smaller, question.)

  "I–I'm sorry, Konrad," she heard herself say. "I'm afraid I've got other plans that evening."

  "I see," he said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry I've taken up your time. I hope I wasn't too much of a bother. Good night." He hung up.

  So did Susanna. Part of her felt as if she'd passed a test, maybe the hardest one she'd ever face. The rest…She filled her glass with Glenfiddich and poured it down the hatch as if it were so much rotgut. Then, two or three minutes later, she did it again.

  Her head started to spin. She didn't care. Tonight, she would have been good company for the drunk she'd dumped. She'd feel like hell tomorrow. That was all right. She felt like hell right now, too.

  Admiral Yamamoto's again. A big plate of Berlin rolls, herring and onion and seaweed and rice. Wasabi to heat them up. Wheat beer to wash them down. Imperfectly Japanese. Perfectly good.

  The place was jammed, as usual. Heinrich and Willi sat at a tiny table wedged up against the wall. Bureaucrats and soldiers. SS men and Party Bonzen. Businessmen and tourists. Secretaries and shopgirls. A radio going in the background. Nobody paying any attention to it. Nobody able to pay any attention to it, because you couldn't hear anything but the din of people chattering.

  After a bite of his shrimp tempura, Willi said, "Beats the hell out of what they were feeding you a little while ago, doesn't it?"

  Heinrich eyed him. Try as he would, he couldn't find any irony. Reluctantly, fighting hard not to believe it, he decided Willi meant that as a simple comment, not as any sort of jab or gibe. Anyone else would have, anyone else at all. Heinrich nodded. "I thought of that the last time we were here. You might say so. Yes, you just might."

  An SSHauptsturmfuhrer a couple of tables over laughed uproariously at something one of his underlings had said. He waved a seidel in the air for a refill. Willi raised an eyebrow. "Noisy bastard. Even for this joint, he's a noisy bastard."

  "Ja."Heinrich eyed the fellow. He'd seen him before. Even more to the point, he'd heard him before, right here. "Last time we were in this place at the same time as he was, he was pitching a fit about the first edition. I wonder what he thinks with the election just a few days away."

  "Is it that same captain?" Willi tried not to be too obvious looking him over. "By God, I do believe you're right. All those SSSchweinehunde look the same to me." He said that very quietly. He might despise blackshirts, but he didn't want them knowing he did. Everyone who wasn't in it despised the SS. Hardly anybody dared to come right out and say so where anyone but trusted friends could hear.

  Am I still Willi's trusted friend?Heinrich wondered.When it comes to Lothar Prutzmann's boys, I suppose I am-they threw me in the jug, after all. When it comes to Erika… When it came to Erika, if he never set eyes on her again, that would suit him down to the ground.

  The Hauptsturmfuhrer poured down his fresh mug of beer. One of the noncoms with him said something Heinrich couldn't make out. The officer nodded. Putting on a comic-opera Japanese accent, he said, "They want an erection, ret them go to a borderro!" He made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down, and howled laughter right afterwards. His henchmen thought it was pretty funny, too.

  "Charming people," Willi muttered-again, so softly only Heinrich could hear.

  "Aren't they?" Heinrich agreed. "Shows they're good and serious about moving the Fuhrer 's reforms ahead, too."

  Neither his words nor Willi's seemed disrespectful to the SS. If anyone was secretly recording their conversation, he would have a hard time proving sardonic intent-unless he also recorded the Hauptsturmfuhrer 's joke. Even then, he might think they approved of what the officer had said. Saying one thing and meaning another was an art people learned young in the Greater German Reich.

  Not that SS men had to worry about such things. Of course, much of what they said amounted to,I'm going to punch you in the nose, and you can't do a thing about it. When that was the message, subtlety lost its point.

  A pair of Wehrmacht officers got to their feet and stalked out. The looks they sent the Hauptsturmfuhrer would have melted titanium. But not even they had the nerve to confront him directly.

  He noticed. He laughed. He said something to the other SS men at the table with him. To Heinrich, they sounded like carrion crows cawing over the body of something that would soon be dead. Their black uniforms only emphasized the resemblance. And what sort of untimely demise would the blackshirts anticipate with so much glee? Only one thing occurred to Heinrich: the death of reform, the death of the chance to speak your mind, the death of the chance to remember the past as it really was, the death of the chance not to make the same mistake again.

  He shivered, though it was a warm spring day and the crowded restaurant fairly radiated heat. He gulped what was left of his beer almost as fast as the Hauptsturmfuhrer had drained his. Then he took out his wallet and laid down enough money to cover the bill. "Come on," he told Willi. "Let's get out of here."

  Willi hadn't quite finished lunch. He started to say something-probably something pungent. But whatever he saw in Heinrich's face made him change his mind. "Give me half a minute," was as much protest as he offered. He devoured his last tempura shrimp in hardly more time than he'd promised. Still chewing, he got to his feet. "All right. I'm ready."

  "Thanks," Heinrich said once they were out on the sidewalk.

  "Don't worry about it." With an expansive wave, Willi brushed aside gratitude.

  They walked toward the bus stop. After a few strides, Heinrich asked, "Why didn't you argue with me more?"

  "Are you kidding?" Willi said. "You looked like a goose walked over your grave. You were going to get the hell out of there regardless of whether I came along. So I figured I might as well come." He made things sound simple. He usually did-whether they were or not.

  "Thanks," Heinrich said again. After another few paces, he added, "It wasn't a goose-but you're close enough."

  "Come on, Heinrich!" Lise said. "Do you want to be late for work?" She looked toward the stairway. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane should have come down for their breakfast. They hadn't, not yet. Lise threw her hands in the air. "Does everybody want to be late this morning?"

  "I'm going, I'm going," her husband said. He put down his coffee cup, gave her a quick, caffeinated kiss, grabb
ed his attache case, and hurried out the front door, calling, "Good-bye, girls!" as he went.

  Only silence from the second floor. Two minutes later, though…Lise decided that couldn't possibly be a herd of buffalo on the stairs, which meant it had to be her daughters. They swarmed into the kitchen. By the way they ate, she hadn't fed them for six or eight weeks. Eggs, bacon, sweet rolls-where were they putting it all?

  "I ought to make you take off your shoes and see if you're hiding breakfast in there," Lise said. The girls made faces at her. The time they'd spent in that foundlings' home didn't seem to have done them any harm. Francesca and Roxane were still sure they'd gone there by mistake. Alicia knew better, even if she couldn't say so while her sisters were around. But even she was young enough to have a lot more resilience than most grownups would have. And she was young enough for death not to seem altogether real to her, which also helped.

  Lise wished she could say the same. She'd died ten thousand times before her husband and children came home.

  Then Roxane raced up the stairs with a wail of dismay: "I forgot to do my arithmetic homework!"

  Unlike her sisters, she did such things every once in a while. This time, at least, she remembered she'd forgotten. "Work fast!" Lise called. "You still have to catch the bus."

  "We could go on, Mommy," Francesca said.

  "No, wait for your sister. You've got time." Lise looked at the clock on the range. "I hope you've got time. She'd better not take too long." Another glance at the clock. Why couldn't mornings ever run smoothly?Because then they wouldn't be mornings, that's why.

  "She could do some of her homeworkon the bus," Alicia suggested.