Departures

IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES

In the course of research for an upcoming novel set in 1942, I read Albert Speer’s memoirs, and also some of those left behind by the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Combining Speer’s-and Hitler’s- grandiose vision of the Berlin that would rise after Germany won the war with the desperate reality of Jewish life under Nazi rule led to this story. Thank God it’s fiction.

Heinrich Gimpel glanced at the report on his desk to see again how many Reichsmarks the United States was being assessed for the Wehrmacht bases at New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. As he’d thought, the figures were up from those of 2009. Well, the Americans would pay-and in hard currency, too; none of their inflated dollars-or the panzer divisions would move out of those bases and collect what was owed the Germanic Empire. And if they collected some blood along with their pound of flesh, the prostrate United States was hardly in a position to complain.

Gimpel typed the new numbers into his computer, then saved the study on which he’d been working for the last couple of days. The Zeiss disk drive purred smoothly as it swallowed the data. He turned off the machine, then got up and put on his uniform greatcoat: in Berlin’s early March, winter still outblustered spring.

“Let’s call it a day, Heinrich,” Willi Dorsch said. Willi shared the office with Gimpel. He shook his head as he donned his greatcoat. “How long have you been here at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht now?”

“Going on twelve years,” Gimpel answered, buttoning buttons. “Why?”

His friend cheerfully sank the barb: “All that time at the high command, and a fancy uniform, and you still don’t look like a soldier.”

“I can’t help it,” Gimpel said; he knew too well that Willi was right. A tall, thin, balding man in his early forties, he had a tendency to shamble instead of parading, and wore his greatcoat as if it were cut from the English tweeds some professors still affected. He tried to set his high-crowned cap at a rakish angle, raised an eyebrow to get Dorsch’s reaction. Willi shook his head. Gimpel shrugged, spread his hands.

“I suppose I’ll just have to be martial for both of us,” Dorsch said. His cap gave him a fine dashing air. “Doing anything for dinner tonight?” The two men lived not far from each other.

“As a matter of fact, we are. I’m sorry. Lise invited a couple of friends over,” Gimpel said. “Let’s get together soon, though.”

“We’d better,” Dorsch said. “Erika’s saying she misses you again. Me, I’m getting jealous.”

“Oh, quatsch,” Gimpel said, using the pungent Berliner word for rubbish. “Maybe she needs her spectacles checked.” Willi was blond and ruddy and muscular, none of which desirable adjectives applied to Gimpel. “Or maybe it’s just my bridge game.”

Dorsch winced. “You know how to hurt a man, don’t you? Come on, let’s go.”

The wind outside the military headquarters had a bite to it. Gimpel shivered inside his overcoat. He pointed off to the left, toward the Great Hall.”The old-timers say the bulk of that thing has messed up our weather.”

“Old-timers always complain,” his friend answered. “That’s what makes them old-timers.” But Willi’s gaze followed Gimpel’s finger. He saw the Great Hall every day, but seldom really looked at it. “It’s big, all right, but is it big enough for that? I doubt it.” His voice, though, was doubtful, too.

“You ask me, it’s big enough for damn near anything,” Gimpel said. The Great Hall, built sixty years earlier in the great flush of triumph after Britain and Russia had gone down before the guns and tanks of the Third Reich, boasted a dome that reached over two hundred twenty meters into the sky and was more than two hundred fifty meters across: sixteen St. Peter’s cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the grandeur of the Aryan race. The wealth of a conquered continent had brought it into being.

The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a great green hill. Atop it, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, a red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.

Willi Dorsch’s shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. “It makes me feel tiny.”

“It’s a temple to the Reich and the Volk. It’s supposed to make you feel tiny,” Gimpel answered. “Set against the needs of the German race or the state, any one man is tiny.”

“We serve them, not they us,” Willi agreed. He pointed across the Adolf Hider Platz toward the F?hrer’s palace on the far side of the immense square. “When Speer ran that one up, he was worried the size of the building would dwarf even our Leader himself.” And indeed, the balcony above the tall entranceway looked like an architectural afterthought.

Gimpel’s short laugh came out as a puff of steam. “Not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him.”

“Better not let the security police hear you talk that way about one of the Reichsvaters.” Dorsch tried to laugh, too, but his chuckle rang hollow. The security police had to be taken seriously.

Still, Gimpel was right. When the F?hrer’s palace was erected, another huge Germanic eagle had surmounted the balcony from which the Germanic Empire’s leader might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved to its present position on the roof when Gimpel was a boy. In its place went an enormous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz had been built to hold a million people. Now when the F?hrer spoke, every one of them could get a proper view.

A bus purred up to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. Gimpel and Dorsch filed aboard with the rest of the officials who greased the operation of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one the commuters stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus’s computer debited each rider eighty-five pfennigs.

The bus rolled down the broad avenue toward South Station. Berlin’s myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of the passengers but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible boulevard that world boasted. Blas? as any native, Gimpel normally paid but scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today, though, the oohs and ahhs of those seeing them for the first time made him notice them also.

Sentries from the Grossdeutschland division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk took photos of the Fuhrer’s guards. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists would not see them, were other troops in businesslike camouflage smocks, assault rifles in place of the ceremonial force’s obsolete Gewehr 98s, and enough armored fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visitors from afar were not encouraged to think about them. Neither were most Berliners. But Gimpel reckoned up Grossdeutschland’s budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.

Neon lights came on in front of theaters and restaurants as darkness deepened. Dark or light, people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman-style building that held a heated indoor pool the size of a young lake. It was open at all hours of the day and night for those who wished to exercise, to relax, or simply to ogle attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the Heiratbad, the marriage baths, sometimes amended by the cynical to the Heiratbett, the marriage bed.

Past the pool, the Soldiers’ Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the street. The Soldiers’ Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Among the exhibits it so lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany had yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compound; one of the gliders that had landed paratroops in southern England; and, behind thick leaded glass, the twisted remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia.

Old people in Berlin still called the Air and Space Ministry the Reichsmarschall’s Office, in memory of Hermann Goring, the only man ever to hold that exalted rank. Willi Dorsch used its more common name when he nudged Gimpel and said, “I wonder what’s happening in the Jungle these days.”

“Could be anything,” Gimpel answered. They both laughed. The roof of the ministry had been covered with four meters of earth, partly as a protection against aerial bombardment, and then planted, partly to please Goring’s fancy (his private apartment was on the top floor). The old Reichsmarschall was almost half a century dead, but the orgies he’d put on amid the greenery remained a Berlin legend.

Willi said, “We aren’t the men our grandfathers were. In those days they thought big and weren’t ashamed to be flamboyant.” He sighed the sigh of a man denied great deeds by the time in which he chanced to live.

“Poor us, doomed to get by on matter-of-fact competence,” Gimpel said. “The skills we need to run our empire are different from those Hitler’s generation used to conquer it.”

“I suppose so.” Dorsch clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I envy you your contentment here and now, Heinrich. I almost joined the Wehrmacht when I was just out of the Hitler Jugend. Sometimes I still think I should have. There’s a difference between this uniform”-he ran a hand down his double-breasted greatcoat-”and the one real soldiers wear.”

“Is that your heart talking, or did you just all of a sudden remember you’re not eighteen years old anymore?” Gimpel said. His friend winced, acknowledging the hit. He went on, “Me, I’d fight if the Fatherland needed me, but I’m just as glad not to be carrying a gun.”

“We’re all probably safer because you don’t,” Dorsch said.

“This is also true.” Gimpel took off his thick, gold-framed glasses. In an instant, the street outside, the interior of the bus, even Willi beside him, grew blurry and indistinct. He blinked a couple of times, returned the glasses to the bridge of his nose. The world regained its sharp edges.

The neon brilliance of the street outside dimmed as the bus passed by the theaters and shops and started picking up passengers from the ministries of the Interior, Transportation, Economics, and Food. More uniforms that don’t have soldiers in them, Gimpel thought. The buildings from which the new riders came were shutting down for the day.

Two of those ministries, though, like the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, never slept. A new shift went into the Justice Ministry to replace the workers who left for home. German justice could not close its eyes, and woe betide the criminal or racial mongrel upon whom their omniscient gaze lighted. Himself a thoroughly law-abiding man, Gimpel still shivered a little every time he passed that marble-fronted hall.

The Colonial Ministry was similarly active. Much of the world, these days, fell under its purview: the agricultural towns of the Ukraine, the mining colonies in central Africa, the Indian tea plantations, the cattle herders on the plains of North America. As if picking that last thought from Gimpel’s mind, Willi Dorsch said, “How many Americans does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“The Americans have always been in the dark,” Gimpel answered. He clucked sadly. “Your father was telling that one, Willi.”

“If he was, he sounded more relieved than I do. The Yankees might have been tough.”

“Might-have-beens don’t count, fortunately.” Isolation and neutrality had kept the United States from paying heed as potential allies in Europe went down one after another. It faced the Germanic Empire and Japan alone a generation later-and its oceans were not wide enough to shield it from robot bombs.

Just ahead lay another monument to German victory: Hider’s Arch of Triumph. Gimpel had been to Paris on holiday and seen the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs Elysees. It served as a model for Berlin’s arch and was a model in scale as well. The Arc de Triomphe was only about fifty meters tall, less than half the height of its enormous successor. The Berlin arch was almost a one hundred seventy meters wide and also a one hundred seventeen meters deep, so that the bus spent a good long while under it, as if traversing a tunnel through a hillside.

When at last it emerged, South Station lay not far ahead. The station building made an interesting contrast to the monumental stone piles that filled the rest of the avenue. Its exterior was copper sheeting and glass, giving the traveler a glimpse of the steel ribs that formed its skeleton.

The bus stopped at the edge of the station plaza. Along with everyone else, Gimpel and Dorsch filed off and hurried across the plaza toward the waiting banks of elevators and escalators. They walked between more displays of weapons that had belonged to Germany’s fallen foes: the wreckage of a British fighter, carefully preserved inside a Lucite cube; a formidable-looking Russian tank; the conning tower of an American submarine.

“Into the bowels of the earth,” Dorsch murmured as he reached out to grab the escalator handrail. The train to Stahnsdorf boarded on the lowest of the station’s four levels.

Signs and arrows and endless announcements over the loudspeaker system should have made it impossible for anyone to get lose in the railway station. Gimpel and Dorsch found their way to their commuter train almost without conscious thought. So did most Berliners. The swarms of tourists, however, were grit in the smooth machine. Uniformed youths and maids from the Hitler Jugend helped those for whom even the clearest instructions were not clear enough.

Even so, the natives grumbled when foreigners got in their way. Dodging around an excited Italian who had dropped his cheap suitcase so he could use both hands to gesture at a Hitler

Youth in brown shirt, swastika armband, and lederhosen, Dorsch growled, “People like that deserved to be sent to the shower.”

“Oh, come on, Willi, let him live,” Gimpel answered mildly.

“You’re too soft, Heinrich,” his friend said. But then they rounded the last corner and came to their waiting area. Dorsch looked at the schedule board on the wall, then at his watch. “Five minutes till the next one. Not bad.”

“No,” Gimpel said. The train pulled into the station within thirty seconds of its appointed time. Gimpel thought nothing of it as he followed Dorsch into a car, he noticed only the very rare instances when it was late. As the two men had in the bus, they put their account cards into the fare slot and then took their seats. As soon as the computer’s count of fares matched the car’s capacity, the doors hissed shut. Three more cars filled behind them. Acceleration pressed Gimpel back against the synthetic fabric of his chair as the train began to move.

Twenty minutes later the engineer’s voice came over the roof-mounted speakers: “Stahnsdorf! All out for Stahnsdorf!”

Gimpel and Dorsch were standing in front of the doors when they hissed open again. The two commuters hopped off and hurried through the little suburban station to the bus stop outside. Another five minutes and Dorsch got up from the local bus. “See you tomorrow, Heinrich.”

“Say hello to Erika for me.”

“I’m not sure I ought to,” Willi said. Both men laughed. Dorsch got off the bus and trotted toward his house, which was three doors down from the comer.

Gimpel rode for another few stops, then descended himself. His own house lay at the end of a cul-de-sac, so he had to walk for a whole block. It’s healthy for me, he told himself, a consolation easier to enjoy in spring and summer than in winter.

The snick of his key going into the lock brought shouts of “Daddy!” from inside the house. He smiled, opened the door, and picked up each of his three girls in turn for a hug and a kiss: they ranged down in age from ten by two-year steps.

Then he lifted his wife as well. Lise Gimpel squawked; that was not part of the evening ritual. The girls giggled. “Put me down!” Lise said indignantly.

“Not till I get my kiss.”

She made as if to bite his nose instead, but then let him kiss her. He set her feet back on the carpet, held her a little longer before he let her go. She was a pleasant armful, a green-eyed brunette several years younger than he who had kept her figure very well. When he released her, she hurried back toward the kitchen. “I want to finish cooking before everyone gets here.”

“All right,” he said, smiling as he watched her retreat. While he hung up his greatcoat and took off his tie, his daughters regaled him with tales out of school. He listened to three simultaneous stories as best he could. Lise came out again long enough to hand him a goblet of liebfraumilch, then started away.

The chimes rang before she got out of the front room. She whirled and stared indignantly at the door. “I am going to boot Susanna right into the net,” she declared.

Gimpel looked at his watch. “She’s only ten minutes early this time. And you know she’s always early, so you should have been ready.”

“ Hmp,” Lise said while he went to let in their friend. Meanwhile, the girls started chorusing, “Susanna is a football! Aunt Susanna is a football!”

“Heinrich, why are they calling me a football?” Susanna Weiss demanded. She craned her neck to look up at him. “I’m short, yes, and I’m not emaciated like you, but I’m not round, either.” She shrugged out of a mink jacket and thrust it into his hands. “Here, see to this.”

Chuckling, he clicked his heels. “Jawohl, meine Dame. “

She accepted the deference as no less than her due. “Fraulein Doktor Professor will suffice, thank you.” She taught medieval English literature at Humboldt University. Suddenly she abandoned her imperial manner and started to laugh, too. “Now that you’ve hung that up, how about a hug?”

“Lise’s not watching. I suppose I can get away with that.” He put his arms around her. She barely reached his shoulder, but her vitality more than made up for her lack of size. When he let go, he said, “Why don’t you go into the kitchen? You can pretend to help Lise while you soak up our Glenfiddich.”

“Scotch almost justifies the existence of Scotland,” she said. “It’s a cold, gloomy, rocky place, so they had to make something nice to keep themselves warm.”

“If that’s why people drink it, your boyfriend is lucky he didn’t set himself on fire here a couple of years ago.”

“My former boyfriend, danken Gott daftir,” Susanna said. All the same, she blushed to the roots of her hair; her skin was very fine and fair, which let him watch the blush advance from her throat. “I didn’t know he was a drunk, Heinrich.”

“I know,” he said gently. If he teased her too far, she’d lose her temper, and nothing and nobody was safe if that happened. “Go on; Lise’s trying that recipe you sent her.”

The girls waylaid Susanna before she made it to the kitchen. Though shed never been married, she made an excellent ersatz aunt; she took children seriously, listened to what they had to say, and treated them like small adults. Gimpel smiled. Come to that, she was a small adult herself. He knew better than to say so out loud.

Walther and Esther Stutzman arrived a few minutes later, along with their son Gottlieb and daughter Anna. Anna promptly went off with the Gimpel girls; she was a year older than Alicia, the eldest of the three. Heinrich Gimpel stared at Gottlieb. “Good heavens, is that a mustache?”

The younger male Stutzman touched a finger to the space between his upper lip and his nose. “It’s going to be one, I hope.” At the moment, the growth was hard to see. For one thing, he had only just turned sixteen. For another, his hair was even fairer than his father’s. And for a third, he’d chosen to keep untrimmed only a toothbrush mustache; the first Fuhrer’s style was newly popular again.

Walther Stutzman differed from his son in appearance only by the presence of twenty-odd years and the absence of any vestiges of a mustache. As he handed Gimpel his topcoat, he asked quietly, “Tonight?”

“Yes, I think Alicia’s ready,” Gimpel answered as quietly. “I told her she could stay up late. How has Anna done the past year?”

“Well enough,” her father said.

“We’re still here, after all,” Esther Stutzman put in. A slim woman with light brown hair, she peered at Gimpel through glasses thicker than his own. Somehow, in spite of everything, her laugh managed to hold real mirth. “And if she hadn’t done well, we assuredly wouldn’t be.”

“Wouldn’t be what, Aunt Esther?” Alicia Gimpel asked, a doll under one arm.

“Wouldn’t be standing out here in the hall talking if we expected the curly-haired Gestapo to be listening in,” Esther said. Her grin took all sting from the words.

Imitating her father, Alicia said, “Oh, quatsch!” Anna Stutzman tried to sneak up behind her, but she whirled before she got tickled. Both girls squealed. They ran off together, Alicia’s brown curls bobbing beside Anna’s blond ones. They were very much of a height; though Anna was a year older, Alicia was tall for her age.

“Dinner!” Lise called from the kitchen. Everyone went into the dining room. Heinrich Gimpel and Anna’s brother Gottlieb dropped the leaves on the table to accommodate the unusual crowd. Walther, meanwhile, fetched a couple of extra chairs, while Susanna Weiss arranged them around the table.

They all paused to admire the fragrantly steaming pork roast before Gimpel attacked it with fork and carving knife. With onions, potatoes, and boiled parsnips, it made a feast to fight the chill outside and leave everyone happily replete. Most of the talk that punctuated the music of knife and fork was praise for Lise’s cooking.

Smooth wheat beer mixed with raspberry syrup accompanied the meal. The two younger Gimpel girls, who usually were allowed only small glasses, got grownup-sized mugs. They proudly drained them dry, and were nodding by the time their mother brought out dessert. They munched their way through the little cakes stuffed with prunes or apricots or mildly sweet chocolate, but the filling sweets only made them sleepier. The food slowed Alicia down, too, but she was buoyed by the prospect of sitting up and talking with the adults.

Seeing her daughter’s excitement, Lise Gimpel said, “She doesn’t know yet how boring we can be, with our chatter of children and taxes and work and who’s going to bed with whom.”

“Who is going to bed with whom?” Esther asked. “It’s more interesting than taxes and work, that’s for certain.”

Susanna parodied a Hider Jugend song: “In the fields and on the heath, we lose strength through joy.” Gottlieb Stutzman blushed almost as red as she had before. Teasing him, she said, “Why, Gottlieb, don’t you hope to meet a friendly maiden when you go to work your year in the fields?”

“It is not practical, not for me,” he answered stiffly, rubbing a finger over his peach-fuzz mustache.

“It is not practical for any of us, as Susanna knows.” Walther Stutzman gave her a severe look. “It is also not practical for us to sing that song anywhere but among ourselves. If the Security Police hear it-”

“It’s wiser not to draw the attention of the Security Police in any case,” Lise Gimpel said with her usual solid good sense. “Even children know that.” She looked at her own two younger children, who were valiantly trying not to yawn. “After I get the table cleared away, time for the little ones to go to bed.”

Heinrich Gimpel nodded to Walther and Gottlieb Stutzman. “Nice to have some other men in the house for a change,” he said.

“You are outnumbered, aren’t you?” Walther said. “Me, I kept the numbers even. But then, that’s what they pay me for.” He had a moderately important post with the computer design team at Zeiss.

Everyone, even the men, pitched in to help Lise cart dirty dishes and leftovers (not that there were many of those) back to the kitchen. The two younger Gimpel girls took off their party dresses and put on long cotton nightgowns. They collected kisses from the grown-ups, then went off to their bedroom, not without a couple of sleepily envious glances at Alicia, who got to stay up.

Alicia herself looked curious and excited. She sat on the edge of the couch, her eyes now on her parents, now on Susanna or Esther or Walther or Gottlieb. As Lise Gimpel had said, her eldest daughter didn’t know what the grownups talked about after she went to sleep, and could hardly wait to learn.

Her gaze swung to her friend Anna. “You’ve found out what the secret is,” she said accusingly.

“Yes, I have.” Anna sounded so serious that Heinrich Gimpel’s heart went out to her. Alicia, though, put on what he thought of as her angry face. Anna also saw that. Quickly, she added, “After tonight, you’ll know, too.”

“All right,” Alicia said, part way mollified. Then she said, “Why are all of you staring at me like that? I don’t like it.” She twisted around to bury her face against a sofa pillow.

“It’s an important secret, dear,” her mother answered. “Come out, please. It’s such an important secret, you can’t even tell it to your sisters.”

That got through to Alicia. Heinrich saw her eyes go wide. He said, “You can’t tell it to anybody at all. We waited until you were old enough so we could tell you, because we wanted to be sure”-as sure as we could be, he glossed mentally-”you wouldn’t give us away by telling someone you shouldn’t.”

“I’ve known for a year now,” Anna said to Alicia, “and I didn’t even tell you. See how important it is?” Hearing the pride in her voice, Gimpel glanced over to Esther and Walther. They looked proud, too-proud and frightened. The fear never went away, though showing it anywhere in public was also dangerous.

“What is it, then?” Alicia said. “You’re right, Anna; I never knew you had a secret, and I’m your best friend.” She sounded hurt, but only a little: her time to learn had come. She repeated, “What is it?”

Heinrich and Lise did not answer, not right away. Now that the moment was here, all the gentle introductions they had planned seemed worthless. Yet coming right out and saying what had to be said-that, Gimpel feared, was likelier to horrify Alicia than to enlighten her. While they hesitated, Susanna Weiss did the job with one blunt sentence: “You are a Jew, Alicia.”

The girl stared, then shook her head, as if at a joke. “Don’t be silly, Aunt Susanna. There are no more Jews, not anywhere. They’re kaput- finished.” She spoke with the assurance of one reciting a lesson well learned in school.

Heinrich Gimpel shook his head, too, to contradict her. “You are a Jew, Alicia. Your sisters are Jews, too. So is Susanna. So are Esther and Walther and Gottlieb and Anna. And so are your mother and I.”

The color slowly drained from Alicia’s cheeks as she realized her father meant what he said. “But-but,” she faltered, and then rallied: “But Jews were filthy and wicked and diseased and racially impure.” All the textbook lessons; Heinrich remembered how he had learned them, too. Perhaps trying to convince herself, Alicia went on. “That’s why the wise Reich got rid of them. That’s what my teacher says.”

“One of the hardest lessons anyone learns is that not everything your teacher tells you is true,” Walther Stutzman said. “For us, it’s doubly hard.”

“Is Anna filthy?” Lise Gimpel asked.

“Of course not,” Alicia said indignantly. She looked to her friend as if wanting Anna to tell her this was all just a game. But Anna looked back with impressively adult solemnity; she knew what rode on holding this secret close.

“Are your father and I wicked?” Lise persisted. “Is Susanna diseased?”

“I can get to feel that way, the morning after too much Scotch,” Susanna said.

“Hush, Susanna,” Lise said.

“But-what happens if anyone else finds out I’m-I’m a Jew?” Alicia said. She pronounced the name with difficulty; it was too strong a curse to find in the mouth of a well-brought-up ten-year-old. “If my friends at school know, they won’t like me anymore.”

“It will be worse than that, dear, if your friends at school find out,” Heinrich Gimpel said. “If anyone learns you’re a Jew, the Einsatzkommandos will come for you, and for your sisters, and for your mother and me, and for the Stutzmans, and for Susanna.” He made his voice hard and implacable, impressing on his daughter that he meant exactly what he said.

Lise tried to soothe Alicia. “No one has to find out, my little one. No one will unless you give yourself away, and us with you. We are well hidden these days, those few of us who are left.” Even her sunny spirit was not proof against the memory of the millions who had died, first in Europe and then, a generation later, in the Vernichtungslagers outside New York and Los Angeles. Shaking her head, she repeated, “We are well hidden.”

“My father helped there,” Walther said. “He altered the Reich’s genealogical data base to show us all to be of pure Aryan blood. No one looks for us any more, not here in the heart of the Germanic Empire. No one thinks there is any reason to look. We are safe enough unless we give ourselves away. One day, maybe, not in our time but when your sons or grandsons have grown up, Alicia, it may be safe for us to live openly as what we are once more. Till then, we go on.”

Alicia tossed her head wildly back and forth; her eyes were wide and staring, like those of a trapped animal. “It will never be safe! Never! The Reich will last for a thousand years, and how can there be room in it for Jews?”

“Maybe the Reich will last a thousand years, as Hitler promised,” Heinrich said. “No one can know that until it happens, if it does. But there have been Jews, Alicia, for close to three thousand years already. Even if the Germanic Empire lives out its whole time, it will still be a baby beside us. One way or another, as Uncle Walther said, we go on. It’s hard to pretend not to be what we really are-”

“I hate it,” Susanna Weiss broke in.

“We all hate it,” Gimpel continued. “But when times are dangerous for Jews, as they are now, what other choice do we have?”

“This isn’t the first time Jews have had to be what they are only in secret,” Esther Stutzman said. “In Spain a long time ago, we pretended to be good Catholics. Now we have to pretend to be good National Socialists. But underneath, we still are what we are.”

“I don’t want to be a Jew!” Alicia shouted, so loud that Heinrich looked nervously toward the windows. If one of the neighbors heard, the Security Police were only a phone call away.

He took a deep breath. “You have a way out, Alicia.” She stared at him, tears and questions in her eyes. He said, “You can just pretend this night never happened. You know we will never betray you, no matter what you decide. If you choose not to tell your husband one day, if he is not one of us, and if you choose not to tell your children, they will never know you-and they-are Jewish. They’ll be just like everyone else in the Germanic Empire. But one more piece of something old and precious will have gone out of the world forever.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Alicia said, the most adult sentence that had ever crossed her lips.

“It’s not so bad, Alicia,” Anna Stutzman said. “I cried, too, when I found out.”

“So did I,” Gottlieb added, which made Alicia’s eyes widen; he was so much older than she that she thought of him as practically a grownup.

Anna went on. “But it’s special in a way, like being part of a club that won’t take just anybody. And it’s not like what we are is written on our foreheads or anything like that, even though it does feel that way at first. But if we keep the secret, no one will find out what we are. We even have our own special holidays-today is one.”

“What’s today?” Alicia asked.

“Today is the festival of Purim,” her father answered. “The Germans and the Spaniards Aunt Esther was talking about were not the first people to want to get rid of the Jews. We’ve always stood out a little because we’re different from the other people in a country. And a long time ago, in the Persian Empire-”

He got out the Bible to help tell Alicia the story. It had both Old and New Testaments, of course; keeping one that didn’t would have been suicidally dangerous. Having a Bible at all entailed a certain small risk, although the National Socialists, having won their wars, were more inclined to tolerate quiet Christianity these days.

“And so,” Heinrich finished, “King Ahasuerus hanged Haman on the very gallows he had built for Mordecai, and Mordecai and Queen Esther lived long, happy, rich lives afterward.” Alicia, caught up in spite of herself by the ancient tale, laughed and clapped her hands.

Very softly, Susanna Weiss said, “I wish someone had built a gallows for Hitler and Himmler. So many of our people gone.” She stared down into her snifter of Scotch. Sometimes Gimpel thought she felt guilty for living on where millions had died.

“I wish I could tell my sisters,” Alicia said.

Walther Stutzman grinned at Heinrich, who smiled back. The year before, Anna had said, I wish I could tell Alicia. Gimpel knew more than a little relief that his daughter was beginning to adjust to the new and shocking knowledge; he remembered his own confusion when he’d learned of his heritage.

But what Alicia had just said was also dangerous. He told her, “You can’t tell them yet-they’re too little. They’ll learn when their time comes, just as you have now. But if the secret reaches the wrong ears, we’re all dead. Just because there aren’t many Jews left doesn’t mean people have stopped hunting us. We’re still fair game.”

“Are we-the people in this room-are we all the Jews who are left?” Alicia asked.

“No,” her father said.’ “There are others, all through Greater Germany and the rest of the empire. In time you’ll meet more, and some may startle you. But for now, the fewer Jews you know, the fewer you can give away if-if the worst happens.”

Alicia’s eyes went far away. Gimpel knew what she was doing: thinking about family friends and wondering which were of her own sort. He’d done the same thing himself. Finding out about Walther Stutzman had been his biggest surprise. The Stutzmans looked like perfect Aryans, and, a generation before, much more had been made of Jews’ allegedly grotesque features.

Lise said, “Even though we have our own holidays, Alicia, we can only celebrate them among ourselves. The little three-cornered cakes we had tonight are special for Purim-they’re call Hamantaschen, Haman’s hats.”

“I like that,” Alicia said. “Serves him right.”

“Yes,” Lise said, “but that’s why you won’t be carrying any of them to school for lunch. People who aren’t Jewish might recognize them for what they are. We can’t afford to take any chances at all, do you see?”

“Not even with anything as little as cakes?” Alicia exclaimed.

“Not even,” Lise said. “Not with anything, not ever.”

“All right, Mama.” The warning about Hamantaschen seemed to have impressed Alicia about the depth of the precautions she’d have to take to survive. Gimpel was glad something had. His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the Ostlands to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, heti show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would not arise, for her sake and his own.

“Is it all right, Alicia?” he asked her. “I know this is a lot to put on a little girl, but we have to, you see, or there won’t be any Jews at all anymore.”

“It’s all right, Father, it really is,” she answered. “It-surprised me. I don’t really know if I like it yet, but it’s all right.” She nodded in a slow, hesitant way that said she thought she meant it but wasn’t quite sure.

That sufficed for Heinrich Gimpel. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment’s notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. Alicia had given him that.

His daughter and Anna Stutzman yawned together, then giggled at each other. Susanna Weiss got up, grabbed her handbag, walked over to Alicia, and kissed her on the cheek. “Welcome to your bigger family, dear. We’re glad to have you.” She turned to Heinrich. “I’d better get home. I have an early class tomorrow morning.”

“We ought to go, too,” Esther Stutzman said. “Either that or we’ll wait till Anna falls asleep-which shouldn’t be more than about another thirty seconds-and bundle her into the broom closet.” Her daughter let out an indignant sniff.

Lise and Heinrich passed out coats. The friends stood gossiping on the front porch for a last couple of minutes. As they chattered, a brightly lit police van rolled by. Alicia gasped in horror and tried to bolt inside. Her father held her arm until the van turned a comer and disappeared. “Everything’s fine, little one,” he said. “They know of us only if we give ourselves away. Do you understand?”

“I-think so, Father.”

“Good.”

The Stutzmans and Susanna walked off toward the bus stop. The Gimpels went back inside. Lise went with Alicia to get her ready for bed. Heinrich rinsed off the dishes and started loading them into the washer. He was still busy when Alicia came out for a good night kiss. Usually that was just part of the nighttime routine; tonight it felt special.

He said, “You don’t have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you’re afraid, people will start to wonder what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self and no one will ever suspect a thing.”

“I’ll try, Papa.” When she hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her, then ran his hand through her hair. “Good night,” she said, and hurried away.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as the machine started to chum, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. “And so the tale gets told once more,” she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich held on to his wife. “And so we try to go on for another generation,” he said. “We’ve outlasted so much. God willing, we’ll outlast the Nazis, too.”

“And of course, now that the tale is told, the risk we’ll get caught also goes up,” Lise said. “You did well there, keeping her from running from the police van.”

“Couldn’t have that,” Gimpel agreed. “But she’ll be nervous for a while now, and she’s so young.” He shook his head. “Strange how our greatest danger lies in making sure our kind goes on. No one would ever suspect you or me.”

“Why else buy pork?”

“I know.” Gimpel took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, set the spectacles back on his nose. “Why else do all the other things we do to seem like perfect Germans? I can quote Mein Kampf more easily than Scripture. But it’s not so easy for a child. And we have two more yet to go.” He let out a long, worn sigh, hugged Lise again. “I’m so tired.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s easier for me, staying home with the Kinder like a proper Hausfrau. But you have to wear the mask every day at your office.”

“It’s either pretend to others I’m not a Jew or pack it in and pretend the same thing to myself. I’m not ready for that. I remember too well.” He thought again of the hidden yellowing photographs from the east. “We will go on, in spite of everything.”

Lise yawned. “Right now, I think I’m going on to bed.”

“I’m right behind you. Oh-speaking of the office, on the way home today Willi said he admired how content I was here and now.”

“Good,” Lise said at once. “If you must wear the mask, wear it well.”

“I suppose so. He also asked if we were busy tonight. I told him yes, since we were, but we’ll be going over there one evening soon.”

“I’ll arrange for my sister to stay with the girls,” Lise said. “Let’s give Alicia a little more time to get used to things before we take her out.”

“Sensible. You generally are, though.”

“Ha!” Lise said darkly. “I’d better be. So bad you.”

“I know.” He chuckled. “Besides, we’ll be able to play more bridge.”

“That’s true.” Lise also laughed. Both of them were long used to the strangeness of having good friends who, if they knew the truth, might well want to send them to an extermination camp. Heinrich was looking forward to getting together with Willi and Erika Dorsch for an evening of talk and bridge., Within the limits of his upbringing, Willi was a good fellow.

Gimpel pondered the limits of his own upbringing, which were a good deal narrower than Willi Dorsch’s. In one way, telling Alicia of her heritage was transcending those limits. In another, it was forcing them on her as well. In still another-He gave up the regress before he got lost in it. “Didn’t you say something about bed?”

“You’re the one who’s been standing here talking,” Lise said.

“Let’s go.”