In The Presence of mine Enemies

X

As far as Susanna Weiss was concerned, faculty new Year's parties were as dismal as they sounded. People who often didn't much like one another gathered in a place where none of them particularly wanted to be. They talked too much. They drank too much. They made passes they would have known were hopeless or offensive if they hadn't drunk too much. And they had to show up and go through the ordeal every bloody year, because if they didn't they would hear about it from the department chairman. Franz Oppenhoff had a long memory for those who disdained his hospitality. Such mistakes had blighted careers.

To add insult to injury, he served cheap scotch.

Even if it was cheap, though, it-and the schnapps, and the brandy, and the wine, and the beer-did help loosen tongues. And even if people did talk too much, there was more to talk about than usual. It wasn't just who'd published what in which academic journal, who'd been promoted or passed over, and who was sleeping with which bright and/or beautiful student. This year, for the first time in Susanna's memory and probably for the first time in old man Oppenhoff's, too, people were talking politics.

"This system has grit in the gears, but I am of the opinion that we can clean it up, lubricate it, and make it run smoothly, the way it should," declared Helmut von Kupferstein, who was a Goethe scholar.

Susanna was of the opinion that von Kupferstein was a pompous ass. He was also thirty centimeters taller than she was, and kept threatening to drop cigarette ashes in her drink without having any idea he was doing it. She also knew he would never have dared such a thing while Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer. Still, she could say, "I hope we can make things better," without fearing the Security Police would haul her away five seconds later, and so she did.

Von Kupferstein-he was the sort who insisted on thevon — nodded ponderously. About a centimeter of ash from the cigarette went flying. Susanna jerked her glass aside just in time. The ash landed on the carpet. She stepped on it. He said, "All things are possible under Heinz Buckliger. 'He who wishes to uphold the truth and has but one tongue, he will uphold it indeed.'" He looked smug at working in a quotation from Faust.

But Susanna, here, couldn't quarrel with him-except about that damned cigarette. "This is a good attitude to have," she said. "We haven't always been perfectly truthful before. 'The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.'" That was a quotation, too, from Mein Kampf. She couldn't very well go wrong there.

Helmut von Kupferstein nodded in recognition. "Oh, yes. But the National Socialists were up-and-comers then," he said. "Such things are beneath the dignity of those who actually rule."

"They haven't been," Susanna said, and walked away. If he thought indignity was the only thing wrong with lies…! But even that wouldn't have occurred to him a year earlier (or, if it had, he wouldn't have had the nerve to say it). If Buckliger was making people look at the way things were and compare them to the way they ought to be, that was a step forward.

Near the liquor-no great surprise there-Franz Oppenhoff stood pontificating to several professors not clever enough to get away but clever enough to look fascinated at the department chairman's every word. Oppenhoff said, "Some remarkable things have happened this past year: not the least remarkable of which is that they have been allowed to happen."

"Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!" three members of the captive audience said at the same time.

"We have been ordered to be free, and so…free we shall be." Professor Oppenhoff stood there beaming, unconscious of any irony. The junior members of the faculty all but genuflected. That the department chairman didn't know he was being ironic frightened Susanna more than anything else.

And yet, was he so far wrong? All Heinz Buckliger had done was loosen the straps of the straitjacket a little. Susanna didn't think the Fuhrer wanted anything more than to make it fit the Reich better. But if people started trying to wiggle out of the sleeves, how could he complain? He was the one who'd made it possible in the first place.

Would they really start wiggling? The English proverb was,Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. The Reich had taken both inches and miles from Britain, forcing the metric system on it. The point remained. If the Fuhrer gave an inch…

Susanna shook her head and went over to the scotch again. If the Fuhrer gave an inch, the SS was all too likely to take it away again-and to break your fingers because you'd tried to grab it.

Professor Oppenhoff fixed himself another drink, too. The old boy had to have a liver like a sponge; he could pour down a lot of sauce without showing it. Like an old-fashioned arch-duke, he inclined his head to Susanna. "A good New Year to you, Professor Weiss," he rumbled, and exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke almost as toxic as mustard gas.

"Thank you, sir. The same to you." Susanna wondered how she could get away.

"I daresay you approve of the radical changes we have seen lately," Oppenhoff observed.

There was a not-quite-question that dropped her right in the middle of a minefield. If she denied it, he'd know she was lying. She'd always been as radical as she could be in a police state. If she admitted it, that might come back to haunt her after a crackdown. The calculations you had to make, living in such a state…

"Hard not to approve of anything that lets us inquire more openly into all sorts of things," she said after no more than a second's silence. If she kept her answer strictly related to business, it was-she hoped-less likely to seem politically dangerous.

"Inquire more openly?" Professor Oppenhoff pondered that with a judicious puff on the cigar and another cloud of poisonous smoke. "We in the Department of Germanic Languages have never been greatly restricted in our scholarship."

"Well, no," Susanna said. Could he be as naive as he sounded? She had trouble believing it. True, the Nazis didn't interfere so much with a professor of Middle English or Gothic or Old High German. But why would they? Susanna's research touched the modern world almost nowhere. If she'd taught sociology or psychology or political science, it would have been a different story. Anthropology? Anthropology was so full of Aryan doctrine, it was hard to tell science-if there was any-from ideology there.

Franz Oppenhoff seemed oblivious to all that. "Inquiry is good," he said with the air of a man making a large concession. Then his gaze sharpened. "And I congratulate you on placing your recent articles in two most distinguished journals. This brings credit to the whole department."

"Danke schon, Herr Doktor Professor," Susanna said. "I hope you will agree it also brings credit to me?"

Did Oppenhoff turn red? With all the booze he carried, it was hard to tell. The cigar could have caused his cough. "No doubt it does," he said without conviction. "Your research is, ah, most original."

"Thank you again," Susanna said, though he hadn't meant it for a compliment. She'd undoubtedly written more about the roles of women in literature, for instance, than all the men in the department put together.Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff would have looked down his nose at that even more than he did-he was an unreconstructed Kuche, Kirche, Kinder man-if she hadn't repeatedly placed her articles in some of the most prestigious academic publications in the Germanic Empire.

"Modern ideas," he muttered now. "Well, you are better suited to cope with them than I am. When they say they are going to change the ideology we have lived under for longer than I have been alive…Is it any wonder I have a hard time working up much enthusiasm?"

"If the change is for the better, we should make it," Susanna said. She made herself a fresh drink, wishing the scotch would change for the better.

"Yes. If," Oppenhoff said. "Who knows? Whatever happens, you are bound to see more of it than I do." With that cheery reflection, he went off to inflict himself on someone else. Susanna took a long pull at the new drink, even if it was nasty. If the Security Police ever found out what she was, the department chairman would outlive her by years.

"What's this?" Heinrich Gimpel asked as he and Willi Dorsch got off their bus and started toward Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. The trip in from Stahnsdorf hadn't been much fun. An icy dagger of a wind from off the Baltic-seemingly straight from the North Pole-brought flurries of snow and spatters of freezing rain with it, which made standing at the bus stop an ordeal. Then the bus had had to detour around a wreck the freezing rain had probably caused. And now black-uniformed Security Police stood alongside the usual Wehrmacht guards. The Wehrmacht men did not look delighted to have company.

"Have you forgotten?" Willi answered. "The Gauleiter 's going to tell us howwunderbar we are this morning."

"Oh, joy." Heinrich had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. Rolf Stolle, the Party leader who essentially ran Berlin, was a hard-drinking, womanizing bruiser. If this generation had anybody whose debauchery came close to the legendary Goring's, Stolle was the man. "What he knows about this place would fit on the head of a pin."

"Well, yes," Willi said. "But he'll be entertaining. Wouldn't you rather listen to him than stare at spreadsheets?"

The honest answer to that was no. If Heinrich said as much, Willi would laugh at him and call him a greasy grind. He shrugged instead. Willi laughed at him anyway, which meant he knew what Heinrich wasn't saying.

Up at the top of the stairs, the Berlin police scrutinized identification cards before giving them to the usual guards to run through the reader. The Wehrmacht men smirked slightly as they returned the cards to Heinrich and Willi.These fellows think they're important, they might have said.They think so, but they're wrong.

Signs taped to the walls said, "HEAR ROLF STOLLE IN THE ASSEMBLY HALL! " Heinrich sighed. He really would rather have worked. What did he need with one more tub-thumping Nazi blowhard? But he couldn't take the chance of antagonizing the Party.If anybody wonders why one of my projects is late, I'll tell the truth, that's all.

Televisor cameras were set up in the assembly hall. Whatever Stolle said would go out locally. It might even go out all over the Reich, all over the Empire. That did not rouse Heinrich's enthusiasm. Broadcast speeches were no more exciting than any other kind.

Rolf Stolle clumped around up on stage. He was a big bald bear of a man, with a wrestler's shoulders and an actor's large, graceful hands. Resignedly, Heinrich sat down in a plushy chair. He wondered if he could fall asleep without being noticed. He closed his eyes in an experimental way. But he was awake. If he hadn't had his morning coffee…He had, though.Maybe Stolle will put me under. There was a hopeful thought.

More analysts and officers and secretaries came in, till the front rows were full and the hall nearly so. It wouldn't do for the Gauleiter to make a televised speech in front of a lot of empty seats. Stolle took his place behind the lectern. More Security Police stood behind him as bodyguards. Heinrich tried to yawn without opening his mouth. By the way Willi snickered, he might have done better.

"Good morning, gentlemen-and all you pretty ladies, too," Stolle boomed. A couple of women giggled at his leer. Heinrich's guess was that the luck he enjoyed with them came from his rank, not from his person.He certainly wouldn't have wanted that big oaf pawing him. The Gauleiter went on, "We are where we are today because of what the Wehrmacht has done for the Reich. Without our armed forces, Germany would be weak and our enemies strong. With them, we are strong, and our enemies mostly dead."

Heinrich didn't bother keeping his mouth shut when he yawned this time. How often had he heard such boastful claptrap? More often than he wanted; he knew that. Next, Stolle would talk about how wonderful the National Socialists were.

And he did: "The Wehrmacht is the gun, and the Party is the man who aims it. We chose the targets for your might, and you knocked them down one by one. Wise leadership served us well."

It was all as predictable as the Mass. With fancy uniforms and swastika flags, the Nazis tried to make such ceremonials as majestic as the Mass, too. In Heinrich's private-very private-opinion, they were just bombastic. To most Party Bonzen, the two words might have been interchangeable.

But then, though Rolf Stolle kept right on hamming it up for all he was worth, he suddenly stopped boring Heinrich, for he went on, "Wise leadership is always important. And our beloved Fuhrer is very wise in setting our affairs to rights. Some of the things we did in days gone by are no longer needed. And some of the things we did in days gone by, perhaps, we never should have done at all."

Heinrich looked at Willi. Willi was looking back at him. A low mutter of surprise ran through the hall. Whatever people had expected Stolle to say, this wasn't it.

"There are people who say, 'Let's not change this,'" he rolled on. "There are people who say, 'Let's not remember this.' There are people who say, 'Let's not remind the Volk that the Party was supposed to be democratic, that the first Fuhrer said so right from the start.' These people, some of them, have lots of decorations. These people, some of them, have lots of power. These people, most of them, have got fat and comfortable and lazy with things just the way they are. And,meine Damen und Herren, that's a pile of crap!"

The mutter of astonishment that went through the hall wasn't low this time. Rolf Stolle beamed, as if he'd set eyes on a good-looking blonde. His bald bullet head gleamed under the televisor lights. "A pile of crap I said,meine Damen und Herren, and a pile of crap I meant. the Fuhrer knows it, too, and he's trying to clean it up. But he needs help. And he needs something else, too.

"Trouble is, Heinz Buckliger is a gentleman. He wants to go slow. He wants to be polite. He doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, God forbid. But I am here to tell you, I don't think going slow and being polite will get the job done. I am here to tell you, when you see a pile of crap, you grab the biggest goddamn shovel you can find, you wade in, and you clean it up. No ifs, ands, or buts."

Stolle slammed his fist down on the lectern. "We have to move faster. We have to push harder. If it were up to me, I'd get rid of a lot of the lemon-faced naysayers who sit behind big desks and look important. Let 'em do something useful for a change, or else put 'em out to pasture.And let the people speak. As soon as we have real elections, you'll see what they think about folk like that. The sooner, the better. And let the chips fall where they may. They will, too.Danke schon. Auf wiedersehen."

He made as much of a production of leaving the stage as most people did of coming to it. Only a thin spattering of applause followed him. Heinrich understood that. He hardly remembered to clap himself. What he'd heard, what Rolf Stolle had said, left him stunned. He couldn't possibly have been the only one, either.

Beside him, Willi said, "My God."

No, Heinrich couldn't have been, and he wasn't. He said, "Some people don't like the Fuhrer because he's doing too much. I knew that. I never dreamt anybody would have the nerve to say he's not doing enough."

"Neither did I," Willi said. "Stolle's off the reservation-he has to be. And he'll beon the televisor. For all I know, that speech could have been broadcast live. What are people going to think? What's Buckliger going to think?"

"Beats me," Heinrich answered. "Maybe he's saying what Buckliger told him to."

"Fat chance! When was the last time anybody ever criticized a Fuhrer? " Willi said. "And you were the fellow who didn't want to come," he added as they got up and started back to their office. "You were the fellow who didn't want to leave his precious desk. What do you think now?"

"I think I'd have felt like an idiot if I'd stayed away," Heinrich said honestly. "A speech like that will go in the history books."If Stolle isn't taken out and shot in the next few days, anyhow. By the look on Willi's face, he was thinking the same thing.

If Rolf Stolle thought his speech would land him in trouble, he gave no sign of it. He came into the office where the budget analysts worked. He wasn't after information, the way Heinz Buckliger had been. He just wanted to see and, especially, to be seen. Heinrich watched Ilse watching the Gauleiter, and watched Willi watching Ilse watching the Gauleiter. Ilse looked charmed, or perhaps calculating. Willi looked… dyspepticwas the word that came to mind.

And Stolle noticed Ilse, too. "Hello, sweetie," he said. "What do you do around here?"

"Why, whatever these gentlemen want me to do,mein Herr, " she answered in a breathy, little-girl voice.

"Do you, now?" the Gauleiter rumbled. His eyes lit up. "Maybe you could do that kind of work for me, too. Let me have your number. We'll see what we can find out." He didn't pretend to be anything but the predator he was. Ilse gave him her extension. Willi quietly steamed. Heinrich did his best to seem very, very busy.

Rolf Stolle swept away, flanked by his bodyguards. How many other phone numbers would he collect before he went back to his own office? More than a few, unless Heinrich was altogether mistaken. He missed some of the subtle human byplay that went on around him. He didn't think he was missing anything here.Subtle was not a word in Stolle's vocabulary.

But some of the words that were in his vocabulary…! When this speech went out, a lot of Party Bonzen would hate him. But a lot of ordinary people would love him. Which counted for more? Till Heinz Buckliger took over, the answer would have been obvious. It wasn't any more.

And whatwould Buckliger himself think of Stolle's speech? That might be the most interesting question of them all.

Esther Stutzman looked up from the billing to see a woman and a little boy come into Dr. Dambach's waiting room. "Good morning,Frau Klein," she said. "Good morning, Eduard. How are you today?"

"I'mall right," said Eduard, who was just in for a checkup.

Maria Klein let out a long sigh. "I'm not so well,Frau Stutzman," she said. In public, they didn't let on how well they knew each other away from the pediatrician's office. But she didn't look good; makeup couldn't hide the dark circles under her eyes, and their whites were tracked with red. "Richard and I have decided to take Paul to a Reichs Mercy Center."

"I'm so sorry," Esther whispered.

"He'll be better," Eduard said. "He'll be happy after that. He's not happy now."

His mother winced and turned away for a moment. It wasn't that Eduard was wrong, for he wasn't. From everything Esther had unwillingly learned, Tay-Sachs disease was a slow descent into hell, made all the worse because the children who suffered from it were too little to understand what was happening to them. But that made it no easier for parents to let go of children who had it. How could you not love a child, even if-or maybe especially because-something was wrong with it?

"He was such a sweet baby," Maria whispered. "He still is, as much as he can be. But he-" She turned away again, and fished a tissue out of her purse. "I don't want Eduard to see me like this," she said, dabbing at her eyes.

"I see you, Mommy." To Eduard, none of this meant much. He was the lucky one. "And Paul will be all better. You and Daddy said so."

"Yes, sweetheart. He'll be just fine," Maria said. "Why don't you go sit down and look at a picture book till it's time to see the doctor?"

Eduard went. The book he picked up was Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. It had been in the waiting room since before Esther started working for Dr. Dambach. The pediatrician took the book for granted. Why shouldn't he? It had been a children's favorite and a Party favorite for seventy-five years. Eduard opened it. He smiled as he swallowed a dose of cheerful, colorful poison.

Maria Klein saw what her son was looking at. The most she could do was exchange a rueful glance with Esther. If she'd come in for an afternoon appointment today, when Irma Ritter sat behind the counter, she couldn't even have done that.

So much Eduard will have to unlearn when he gets older,Esther thought sadly. Gottlieb and Anna were still battling that. So was Alicia Gimpel. Esther knew she was still battling it herself, and would be till the end of her days. When everyone around her thought she and all the people like her deserved to be dead, how could she help wondering whether what the Nazis taught wasn't right after all? Those were the black thoughts, the up-at-three-in-the-morning-and-can't-sleep thoughts. She knew they were nonsense. She knew, but they kept coming back anyway.

Maria sat down by Eduard. He held the book up to her. "Look, Mommy! It's funny!"

She made herself look. She had to know what was in there. When she was Eduard's age, she'd probably thought it was funny, too. With a visible effort, she nodded. "Yes, dear," she said. "It is."

A woman came out of one of the examination rooms carrying a wailing toddler who'd just had a tetanus shot. "She may be cranky and feverish for a day or two, and the injection site will be sore," Dr. Dambach told her. "A pain-relieving syrup will help. If the discomfort seems severe, bring her back in, and I'll look at her." How many times had he made that speech?

"Thank you, Doctor," the woman said. The toddler didn't seem grateful.

"Frau Klein, you can take your boy back in there now," Esther called. Poor Maria got no relief, for Eduard carried Streicher's book into the examining room with him. When he laughed at the anti-Semitic book, that had to be one more lash for her, especially since her other son was dying of a disease commonest among Jews.

Dr. Dambach had patients waiting in the other examining rooms. It was a while before he could get to Maria and Eduard. Once he went in there, he spent a good long while with the Kleins. Esther knew he was thorough. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't have noticed discrepancies in their genealogy. Usually, though, that thoroughness worked for him and for his patients.

When he came out with Maria and her son, he had one hand on the boy's shoulder and the other on hers. "This one here is in the best of health,Frau Klein," he said. "He'll drive you crazy for years to come."

"Crazy!" Eduard said enthusiastically. He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

The pediatrician ignored him, which wasn't easy. Dambach went on talking to Maria Klein: "And I think you are doing the right thing in the other case. The procedure is very fast. It is absolutely painless. And it does relieve needless suffering."

"Paul's, yes," she answered. "What about mine, and my husband's?"

"Things are not always as simple as we wish they would be," Dr. Dambach said with a sigh. "You have the suffering of doing this, yes, but you escape the suffering of watching his inevitable downhill course over the coming months, perhaps even over a couple of years. Which counts for more?"

"I don't know," Maria whispered. "Do you?"

The pediatrician shrugged. He was basically an honest man. Now that the Kleins had been released, he showed no antagonism toward them. He'd done what he thought he had to do in reporting the discrepancy in their pedigree to the authorities. If the authorities turned out not to care, he didn't seem to, either.

Maria went on, "And it's also hard knowing that there's a fifty-fifty chance Eduard carries this horrible-thing inside him."

"Don't let that worry you," Dr. Dambach said. "In most populations, this gene is very rare. Even if he does carry it, the odds that he will marry another carrier are also very slim. There is hardly any chance he would father another baby with this disease."

Maria Klein didn't answer. Like all surviving Jews, she was practiced in the art of deception, so she didn't even look towards Esther. Esther didn't look her way, either, but kept on with the billing as she and Eduard walked out. But she knew, and Maria knew, in fifteen or twenty years Eduard would probably marry a girl who was a Jew. And in how many of those girls did the Tay-Sachs gene lurk?

The Kleins left the waiting room. Esther called in the next patients. But she had trouble keeping her mind on her work. If Jews kept marrying Jews, would disease finish what the Nazis hadn't quite been able to? But if Jews didn't marry Jews, wouldn't the faith perish because they couldn't tell their partners what they were?

Was there a way out? For the life of her, Esther couldn't see one.

Susanna Weiss had been taking her students through Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde. When she asked for questions, one of them asked, "This is the basis for Shakespeare's play, isn't it?"

"It's probably the most important source, yes, but it's far from the only one," she answered. Again, the question reminded her how Shakespeare was a more vital presence in modern Germany than in England. His Troilus and Cressida was rarely produced or even read in English.

A few more questions about the material followed. Students started drifting out the door. Others-not so many-came up to the lectern to ask questions of less general interest, to pump her on what the next essay topic would be, or to complain about the grades they'd got on the last one.

And then one of the students asked, "What did you think of Stolle's speech, Professor Weiss?"

"It was interesting," Susanna answered. "We haven't heard anything like it in a while." That was the truth. When had anyone ever publicly criticized the Fuhrer, even for not pushing his own agenda far enough and fast enough? Had anyone ever done such a thing in all the days of the Third Reich? She didn't think so.

"But what did youthink of it?" he persisted. "Isn't it wonderful to hear somebody come out and speak his mind like that?"

She didn't say anything for a moment.Who are you? she wondered. All she knew about this enthusiastic undergrad was that his name was Karl Stuckart and he was getting a medium B in the course. What did he do when he wasn't in her class? Did he report to the SS? Lothar Prutzmann, who headed the blackshirts, undoubtedly had an opinion about Stolle's speech: a low opinion. And if Stuckart didn't report to the SS, did some of the other smiling students here?The smiler with a knife — a fine Chaucerian phrase.

One of those students, an auburn-haired girl named Mathilde Burchert, said, "I certainly think it's about time we get moving with reform. We've been in the doldrums forever, and the Gauleiter 's right. The Fuhrer 's not going fast enough."

Several other students smiled and nodded. Susanna smiled, too, but she didn't nod. She didn't know much about Mathilde Burchert, either. Was she serious? Was she naive? Was she a provocateur, either working with Stuckart or independently? Were the young men and women who showed they agreed with her fools? Or did they sense a breeze Susanna couldn't, or wouldn't, feel?

She hated mistrusting everyone around her. She hated it, but she couldn't let it go. Were she worried about only her own safety, she thought she would have. But choices she would make for herself she wouldn't for other Jews she might endanger if she turned out to be wrong.

"Whatdo you think, Professor?" another student asked her.

"I think the Fuhrer will go at his own pace regardless of whether anyone tries to jog his elbow," she answered. Hard to go wrong-hard to land in trouble-for backing the Fuhrer. It made her seem safely moderate: not a hard-liner who hated the very idea of change, but not a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing radical, either.

And what's a moderate? Someone who gets shot at from the rightandthe left. She wished she hadn't had that thought.

Karl didn't want to leave things alone. "I wasn't so much talking about what would happen. I was talking about what should happen."

No matter how Susanna seemed, her instincts were of the wild-eyed, bomb-throwing sort, and to a degree that made Rolf Stolle hopelessly stodgy. Like Buckliger, Stolle wanted to reform the Reich. Susanna wanted to see it fall to pieces, to ruin, to disaster unparalleled. She wished its foes would have smashed it in the Second World War, or the Third. Maybe then she could have lived openly as what she was.

I'll never do that now. Hiding is too ingrained in me. Even if I knew they wouldn't kill me, I couldn't reveal myself that way. Easier to walk up the middle of the Kurfurstendamm naked.

"I'd like to vote in an election where I had a real choice," Mathilde said. "I don't know who I'd vote for, but there sure are plenty of people I'd vote against."

Again, several of the youngsters up by the lectern showed they agreed with her. Only a couple of them frowned. But who was more likely to be a spy for the Security Police, someone who pretended to agree or someone who openly didn't?

Susanna sighed. That question had no answer. Anyone could spy for the Security Police, anyone at all.

Mathilde looked right at her. "How about you, Professor Weiss? Don't you think we'd be better off with real elections than with the ones where everybody just votesja all the time? When Horst says all the Reichstag candidates got elected with 99.78 percent of the vote, don't you wonder how he keeps a straight face? It's such a farce! You must feel the same way, too. You're a sharp person. Anyone can tell from the way you lecture. Tell us!"

"Tell us!" the other students echoed.Tell us you're with it. Tell us you're not a fuddy-duddy. Tell us we don't have to turn into fuddy-duddies when we're your age. Please tell us.

Am I a sharp person?Susanna wondered.Am I really? Am I sharp enough to keep my mouth shut when I really want to shout, to scream? "I don't know anything about politics," she said. "As long as the politicians leave me alone, I'll leave them alone, too."

"But theydon't leave us alone," Mathilde said fiercely. "If you say the wrong thing today, you're liable to get a noodle tomorrow." Camp slang permeated German these days. Often, people didn't even know where it came from. When you were talking about a bullet in the back of the neck, though, there wasn't much doubt.

"Well…" Susanna's conditioned caution warred with the fury and outrage she'd bottled up for so long. She surprised herself. What came out was a compromise, and she wasn't usually good at splitting the difference. All or nothing was more her style. But now she said, "I wasn't sorry when the Fuhrer reminded the Volk about what the first edition of Mein Kampf says. In fact, I was in London for a conference last year when the British Union of Fascists reminded us all."

"You were in London for the BUF convention?" Was that awe or horror in Karl Stuckart's voice? Some of each, probably. Maybe he was wondering ifshe had SS connections.

"No, no, no." Susanna shook her head. "I was in London for the Medieval English Association conference. The BUF was meeting across the street." That she'd found some of the Fascist bruisers more interesting than her fellow professors was a secret she intended to keep.

"It's a shame the British had to remind us of what we should have remembered for ourselves-no, what we never should have forgotten," Mathilde Burchert said. Most of the other students nodded. They didn't seem to fear informers or provocateurs. Maybe they were too young to know better, although in the Greater German Reich you were never too young to learn such lessons. Or did they smell freedom on the wind?

Heinrich Gimpel pulled a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter out of the vending machine in the Stahnsdorf train station. A moment later, Willi Dorsch paid fifteen pfennigs for his own copy. On the front page was a color photo of Heinz Buckliger receiving an award in Oslo from the Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Fascist party. the Fuhrer was a big blond man. The Nasjonal Samling officials in the photo were even bigger and even blonder, with long faces and granite cheekbones.

Willi saw the same thing at the same time. "Damned Scandinavians are the only ones who can racially embarrass us," he said. "Bastards look more Nordic than we do."

Was Willi kidding? Was he kidding on the square? Or did he really mean it? Heinrich had trouble telling. Willi loved to joke, but race, in the Reich, was as serious a business as Marxism had been in Russia before it fell. Even the Fuhrer hadn't said anything more than that the Nazi founding fathers might not have understood race the right way. Heinrich gave back a grunt and a nod-a minimal answer.

They went up to the platform together, and got there just in time to catch the train to Berlin. Willi grabbed the window seat, then proceeded to unfold his paper and ignore the scenery rolling by. He'd seen it often enough, anyhow. So had Heinrich, who sat down beside him and also buried his nose in the Beobachter. Willi seemed to ignore his troubles with Erika, too, except that every once in a while he would come out with a remark that also left Heinrich wondering how to take it.

The two of them stiffened within thirty seconds of each other. They both pointed to the same article on page three. The headline above it said ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. The byline was Konrad Jahnke, not a name Heinrich had seen before. He soon found out why: the author declared himself to be a doctor from

Breslau, not a reporter at all.

I am sick and tired,he wrote,of inaccuracies that blacken the history of the Reichand the heroic deeds of our ancestors. Why men who were not there to see them now presume to cast judgment is beyond me. We should be grateful for what our ancestors accomplished. Without their heroism, Jewish Communists in Russia and Jewish capitalists in England and the United States would have swallowed up the whole world between them.

"Well, well," Willi said. "Looks like the other shoe just dropped, doesn't it?"

"You might say that," Heinrich replied. "Yes, you just might say that. Someone didn't like Stolle's speech, did he?"

"Not very much," Willi said. They both spoke of the article elliptically and in understatements. That was the best way to play down how frightening it was.

Heinrich read on with a detached, horrified fascination: the sort of fascination he would have given to a really nasty traffic accident on the other side of the road.The whole business of repression has been blown out of proportion in some younger men's heads, Dr. Jahnke declared.It overshadows any objective analysis of the past. Hitler may have made mistakes, but no one else could have readied the Reichfor the great struggle against Bolshevism. Anyone who thinks he can deny this suffers from ideological confusion and has lost his political bearings.

Jahnke wasn't afraid to name the Gauleiter of Berlin, saying,Rolf Stolle, in his arrogance, departs substantially from the accepted principles of National Socialism. And, he went on,other leaders try to make us believe that the country's past was nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the greatest achievements of the past and the present. He didn't name Heinz Buckliger, but he came close.

There is an internal process in this country and abroad,the doctor from Breslau thundered,that seeks to falsify the truths of National Socialism. Too many ignore the world-historical mission of the Volkand its role in the National Socialist movement. I, for one, can never forsake my ideals under any pretext.

When Heinrich finished the piece, he let out a small, tuneless whistle. Beside him, Willi nodded heavily, as if he'd just done a good job of summing things up. "Who?" Heinrich said. "Who would have the nerve to publish such a thing?"

"Why, you see for yourself," Willi answered. "He's a doctor from Breslau. That gives him the right to say anything he pleases."

"Quatsch,"Heinrich said, and then several things a great deal more pungent than that. "Do you notice how carefully this was timed? Think it's an accident that it shows up in the Beobachter when Buckliger's out of the country?"

"Just a coincidence," Willi said airily. "What else could it possibly be? They got this letter, and an assistant editor liked it, and so…" He couldn't go on, not with a straight face. He started to snort, and then to giggle. Any junior man who published an inflammatory-to say nothing of reactionary-piece like this without getting it cleared from on high would shortly thereafter wish he'd never been born.

"If you want to talk sense now, let's try it again." Heinrich unconsciously lowered his voice, as people did when they spoke of dangerous things. "Who?"

Willi leaned toward him and whispered in his ear: "Prutzmann." Naming the SS chief was more dangerous, and so he did it more quietly. Still whispering, he went on, "Can't be anybody else. If Prutzmann says to print it, who's going to tell him no? the Fuhrer might make a no stick, but he's not here, like you say. Anybody else? Not a chance. No way in hell."

That made much more sense than Heinrich wished it did. If Lothar Prutzmann disliked reform so much, did it have any hope of sticking? If Prutzmann disliked Heinz Buckliger's policies so much, did Buckliger have any chance of staying Fuhrer for very long? It seemed unlikely, to say the least.

"We'll see what happens when Buckliger comes home, that's all," Willi said. "If he lets this ride…" He didn't go on, or need to. If the Fuhrer accepted a rebuke like this, any hope of change was dead, and things would go on as they always had. If Buckliger didn't accept it, though…If he didn't accept it, things were liable to get very interesting very fast.

The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi went up to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Whenever Heinrich saw somebody carrying a Volkischer Beobachter, he tried to eavesdrop. How were Berliners taking this? For that matter, how were people in Breslau and Bonn and other second-rate towns taking it? This might not play out so neatly, or so quickly.

He heard only two snatches of conversation, both from people going down escalators as he was going up past them. One was "-damn fool-" and the other "-about time-"…and both could have meant anything or nothing. So much for eavesdropping.

Nobody on the bus out of South Station seemed to be talking about "Enough Is Enough." That might have been out of a sense of self-preservation; people on that bus were heading for the beating heart of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. Or it might just have been to drive Heinrich crazy. He wouldn't have been surprised.

When he got off in front of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, he looked across Adolf Hitler Platz to the Fuhrer 's palace. Buckliger wasn't there now, of course. But if he didn't already have a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter, he would soon. What he did after that would say a lot about who ran the Reich.

As usual, Heinrich and Willi gave the guards at the top of the stairs their identification cards. One of the guards said, "We'll see if Stolle wants the blackshirts standing watch over him after what's in today's papers."

"Would you?" Willi asked. The guard waited till the card showed green on the machine reader, then shook his head.

That aspect of things hadn't occurred to Heinrich until then. If he were Rolf Stolle, would he want Prutzmann's henchmen keeping him safe? He didn't think so. Who could arrange a tragic accident more easily than bodyguards? Nobody. Nobody in all the world.

Ilse was on the telephone when Heinrich and Willi walked into their big office. She hung up a moment later, her face flushed with excitement. "The Gauleiter is taking me out to lunch today! Me! Can you believe it? Isn't it amazing?"

Heinrich didn't say anything. Willi said, "Amazing," in tones suggesting the only thing along those lines to delight him more would have been an outbreak of bubonic plague. Ilse might not even have noticed his gloom. Next to Rolf Stolle, a budget analyst wasn't amazing at all.

How would Willi handle that? Heinrich sat down, got to work, and watched his friend from the corner of his eye. Willi sat there and fumed: so openly that Heinrich wondered if the office smoke detectors would start buzzing. If Stolle came to pick Ilse up, he might need protection against more than Lothar Prutzmann and the SS.

But the Gauleiter of Berlin didn't come in person. And the men who did take Ilse off to whatever rendezvous Stolle had set up weren't the blackshirted guards who'd accompanied him on his last visit to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. They wore the gray uniforms of ordinary Berlin policemen, men much more likely to follow Stolle than Prutzmann. Willi noticed that, too. Heinrich could see it on his face. It didn't make him look any happier.

Willi's worries, of course, were personal. Heinrich's were more on the order of,If the SS tries to assassinate Stolle, could those fellows keep him safe? Only one answer sprang to mind-how the devil do I know?

Ilse came back from lunch very, very late, with a big bouquet of roses in her arms and schnapps on her breath. She giggled a lot and didn't do much work the rest of the afternoon. Somehow, Heinrich doubted Rolf Stolle had spent their time together talking about how to reform National Socialism.

Lise Gimpel got the last of the dishes in the sink as her husband called, "Hurry up, sweetheart. Horst is just coming on."

"Here I am." Lise sat down beside him on the sofa. She couldn't help adding, "I'd have been here sooner if you'd helped."

"Oh." Heinrich looked astonished, as if that hadn't occurred to him. It probably hadn't. She was just going to beat him about the head and shoulders for his male iniquity when he asked, "Why didn't you say something sooner, when I could have given you a hand?"

That hadn't occurred to her. "I thought you'd be tired from your day at the office."

"By now we're both tired. It's the tired time of day."

He was right about that. Before Lise could say so, Horst Witzleben's handsome, blond, ultra-Aryan features filled the screen. A moment later, after the newscaster's greeting, the scene cut away to a Junkers jet airliner-Luftwaffe Alfa,the code name was-landing at Tempelhof Airport. "Our beloved Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, returned to the capital this afternoon after a highly successful tour of the Scandinavian countries," Witzleben said. "He spoke briefly to reporters before going on to his official residence."

The televisor showed Buckliger standing behind a lectern ornamented with the usual gilded Germanic eagle holding a swastika in its claws. Heinrich leaned forward intently. "This is important, really important," he said. "If he ignored the piece that Jahnke put out last week-"

"Why don't you just listen and find out what he said?" Lise asked. Her husband looked flabbergasted again, so much so that she almost laughed at him.

"I was pleased to visit our fellow-Aryan friends and neighbors to the north," the Fuhrer said, "and particularly pleased to hear their leaders' expressions of support for the course upon which the Reich has embarked. Those leaders feel, as I do, that anyone who seeks to put the brakes on reform is suffering from a bad case of nostalgia for the dead days that will not and cannot return."

"Yes!" Heinrich exploded, as if the German team had scored the winning goal in overtime in the World Cup finals.

"It is proving harder than expected to get rid of old thoughts and habits, but we must not turn back," Buckliger went on. "Recently, some have claimed that we can justify everything that has happened in terms of world-historical necessity. But not all such deeds can be explained away. They are alien to the principles of National Socialism and only took place because of deviations from basic National Socialist ideals."

He went on from there, but that was the meat of it. When he finished, the picture cut back to Horst Witzleben. The newsreader said, "While certain uninformed persons have taken irresponsible positions in the papers, the Fuhrer has made it unmistakably clear that a freer examination of the past and the lessons to be drawn from it is essential to strengthening and reforming National Socialist thought and practice."

Heinrich leaned over and kissed Lise. The kiss developed a life of its own. Suddenly, he didn't seem tired at all. On the screen, Horst kept on talking, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She didn't much care, either. When they finally broke apart, she said, "Gott im Himmel!If I'd known politics didthat for you, I'd have got interested in it a long time ago."

He laughed. She might have been half kidding. On the other hand, she might not have. She wasn't sure herself. He said, "Up till last year, politics just made me want to get sick. But now they're…exciting, you know what I mean?"

"I certainly thought so," she said. She kissed him this time.

"What are the children doing?" he asked hoarsely when they came up for air again.

"Something in their bedrooms. Something too close to our bedroom. We ought to wait till they go to bed."

"Some things shouldn't wait." Her husband let his hand fall on her thigh. "Do you think we can get away with it if we're quick? The worst that can happen is, they embarrass us a little."

"They embarrass us a lot, you mean." But the thought of sneaking while the girls were awake and only a few meters away held a certain attraction of its own. Lise stood up and turned off the televisor. "Come on. We'd better hurry, though."

Hurry they did, behind a closed bedroom door. And they got away with it. "Here's to politics," Heinrich said, still panting a little.

"Never mind politics," Lise told him. "Put your trousers back on."

And that turned out to be good advice, too. No more than a minute and a half after they finished getting dressed, Francesca and Roxane started squabbling over a set of colored pencils. They both burst into the bedroom, each loudly pleading her case to the court of parental authority.

That court was primarily Lise. Because of what had just happened, and because of what might have happened had the girls stormed in a few minutes earlier, she was less concerned with fairness and more concerned with getting them out of there as fast as she could than she usually would have been. Neither one of them seemed too happy about her verdict. She took that as a sign she'd come somewhere close to justice, even if she hadn't hit it right on the nose.

Once they were gone, she sent Heinrich an accusing look. "You!"

"Me?" he yelped. "If I remember right, we were both here. And they didn't see anything. So what are you worrying about?"

"What might have been," Lise answered.

He took that to mean more than she'd intended: "For us, how could what might have been be worse than what really was?"

She thought about it for a long time, and couldn't find an answer.

Alicia Gimpel was talking with Emma Handrick and Trudi Krebs, waiting for the bus to take them home from school, when Francesca came up with steam pouring out of her ears. "What's the matter with you?" Alicia asked.

"The Beast, that's what." Francesca was so furious, she didn't even try to keep her voice down. Had a teacher heard her, she would have got in trouble, and not a little bit, either.

All the girls at the bus stop exclaimed in sympathy. Even some of the boys there did the same. The natural antipathy between Frau Koch and children overpowered the natural antipathy between girls and boys. Some of the other children had already had her. The ones who hadn't knew about her.

"What's she done now?" Alicia asked.

"You know that article that was in the paper a little while ago-that 'Enough Is Enough' thing?" her sister said. "Did your teacher talk about it, too?"

"Some," Alicia answered. Emma and Trudi nodded. Alicia went on, "Herr Peukert was pretty cagey about it, though."Herr Peukert, in fact, had treated the Volkischer Beobachter story as if it were a large, poisonous snake. He couldn't ignore it, but he didn't want much to do with it, either. Alicia said, "How come? What did the Beast tell you about it?"

"Oh, my God, you should have heard her!" Francesca said. "She thought it was the greatest thing since Mein Kampf. She went on and on about how Dr. Jahnke was a true patriot who really understood what National Socialism was all about, and how everybody who liked these stupid newfangled ideas ought to go straight to the showers. She said they sounded like a bunch of stinking, big-nosed Jews put them together."

"Even for the Beast, that's bad," Trudi said. Several people nodded.

"But that's not the worst of it," Francesca said. "She's been talking like this ever since 'Enough Is Enough' came out in the paper. And then yesterday the Fuhrer made a speech, andhe said the article wasn't any good, and we were going to go right on with the new stuff no matter what. And do you know what the Beast said?"

"Did she…say the Fuhrer was wrong?" Alicia asked. A year earlier, the bare possibility wouldn't have occurred to her. All sorts of new possibilities had occurred to her in the past year.

Her sister shook her head. Her hair-straighter and a little lighter brown than Alicia's-flipped back and forth. "No. That would have been bad. What she did was even worse. She started going on about how we needed change and how good it was going to be. It was like she hadn't been talking about the other stuff at all. It was scary."

The bus came up then. Alicia and Francesca sat down together. Emma and Trudi sat on the seat in front of them so they could all keep talking. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Alicia said, "Didn't anybody ask her about that?"

"Werner Krupke did," Francesca answered. "She looked at him like he was something you had to scoop out of the cat box, and she didn't say a thing. Nobody asked any more questions after that."

"I wonder why," Alicia said. Trudi snorted.

Emma said, "Boy, I'm glad I never had the Beast."

Alicia was glad she'd never had Frau Koch, too. How could you call yourself a teacher if what you said on Wednesday didn't count on Thursday? The Beast probably still believed what she'd said before. You didn't say those things if you didn't believe them. When "Enough Is Enough" came out, she must have thought it was safe to say them out loud. How scared was she when she found out she was wrong? Plenty, I hope, Alicia thought.

Trudi had to wiggle past Emma to get out at her stop. "See you tomorrow," she called as she went up the aisle, down the rubber-matted steps, and out the door.

A few stops later, Emma got out with all three Gimpel girls-Roxane had been chattering with a couple of her friends toward the back of the bus. She'd got to the stop after Francesca, and hadn't even noticed how mad she was. Now she did. When she asked why, Francesca started ranting all over again.

"That doesn't sound very good," Roxane said when she could get a word in edgewise, which took a while.

"What does your teacher say about all this stuff?" Alicia asked her.

"She's said the Fuhrer is making some changes in how things work, and they'll probably work better once everything's done," Roxane answered. That seemed sensible enough. And Roxane was only in the first grade. What more did she need to know?

"Has she said anything about 'Enough Is Enough'?" Francesca asked.

"She says that all the time-whenever we're too noisy." Roxane spoke with a certain amount of pride. If she wasn't one of the first-graders who made a lot of the noise, Alicia would have been surprised. But she'd plainly never heard of Dr. Jahnke's article.

Emma waved good-bye to the Gimpel girls when she came to her house. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane walked on. Alicia said, "Maybe getting caught like this will make the Beast pull her horns in."

Francesca gave her a look. "Fat chance!" She was probably right. People like Frau Koch were the way they were, and that was all there was to it. The Beast wasn't about to change her mind or the way she acted. Alicia wouldn't have wanted to be Werner Krupke, who'd called her on her inconsistency. She'd likely make his life miserable for the rest of the school year.

"Home!" Roxane said with a theatrical sigh as they came to the front door.

Mommy let them in. Francesca told her horrible story for the third time. She'd no doubt tell it all over again when Daddy got home, too. Mommy never turned a hair. What was going on inside her? Did she feel the sting because her own daughter didn't know what she was? Of course she did. She had to…didn't she?

When Francesca was done, Mommy said, "The Beast sounds like she's living up to her name, all right. But you've only got her for this school year, and then you'll be done with her forever. And when you have children of your own, you can say, 'You think your teacher's mean? You should hear about the one I had. She was so bad, everybody called her the Beast.'"

Alicia smiled. Francesca didn't. She said, "That doesn't do me any good now!"

"Well, would cookies and milk do you some good now?" Mommy asked. Francesca nodded eagerly. Alicia and Roxane didn't complain, either-not a bit.

Susanna Weiss got back from a shopping run along the Kurfurstendamm a little past seven on a cold, snowy February evening. She set down her packages-three pairs of shoes, including some gloriously impractical high-heeled sandals-took off her foxskin hat, and got out of her overcoat. Then she dithered for a moment, wondering whether to make dinner right away or sit down and watch the rest of the news first.

She poured a knock of Glenfiddich over ice and turned on the televisor. That wasn't Horst Witzleben's face that appeared on the screen. It was Charlie Lynton's. The head of the British Union of Fascists spoke good, if accented, German. He was saying, "-intend here to bring the democratic principles of the first edition into effect as soon as possible. Most seats in the next Parliamentary elections will be contested. I particularly admire the Fuhrer for looking on this course with favor, and for recognizing that he need not yield to the forces of reaction."

His image disappeared. Horst's replaced it. "Along with the Scandinavian leaders, Great Britain stands foursquare behind the Greater German Reich 's revitalization effort," the newscaster said. "We'll be back in a moment."

The picture cut away to an obviously German farm family somewhere in the conquered East-probably on the broad plains of the Ukraine. The advertisement was for Agfa color film. The smiling father took pictures of his wife and children. Relatives in a crowded German apartment admired them when they came in the mail. That not only promoted the film, it also urged Germans to go out and colonize. The Propaganda Ministry didn't miss a trick. Susanna smiled when that phrase went through her mind. It made her think of Heinrich and his passion for bridge.

Another advertisement followed, this one for Volkswagens. They still looked buggy, as they had for more than seventy years. But the lines were smoother, more rounded, now. The engine had moved to the front, the trunk to the rear. The engine was water-cooled these days, and didn't sound flatulent. The bumpers were actually good for something besides decoration. The VW still had a bud vase on the dashboard, though.

Horst Witzleben returned. "In St. Wenceslas Square in Prague, several hundred persons gathered near the statue of the saint to protest the incorporation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into the Reich, " he said.

St. Wenceslas' equestrian statue was surrounded by figures of other Bohemian saints. Counting the large base, the statue stood seven or eight times as high as a man. It dwarfed the men and women at its base and the signs they carried. Some of those signs were in German. They said things like FREEDOM FOR THE CZECHS! and WE REMEMBER! Others, in Czech, presumably said the same thing.

And some of the demonstrators carried flags: the blue, white, and red banners of the long-vanished Republic of Czechoslovakia. A chill ran through Susanna when she recognized those flags. How many years had it been since anyone dared show them in public? Almost as amazing as the sight of the Czechoslovak flags was that of the policemen who stood watching the demonstration without storming in to break it up and throw everybody in sight into jail or a concentration camp.

"Because the protest was peaceful and orderly, no arrests were made," Horst Witzleben said, and he went on to a different story. He spoke as if that had been standard practice in the Third Reich from the beginning, not the next thing to a miracle.

A fat official pontificated about improvements to the harbor in Hamburg. Susanna hardly heard him. Though they'd vanished from the screen, she kept seeing those Czechoslovak flags fluttering in the long shadow St. Wenceslas cast. If those flags could come out of the dark backward and abysm of time-if they could come out and survive-what else might follow them? Susanna shivered with awe.

And then something else occurred to her. She shivered again, this time a lot less happily. Did even Heinz Buckliger know all that might follow if he let people say what they really thought? No one in the Greater German Reich, no one in the part of the Germanic Empire on this side of the Atlantic, had been able to do that for a lifetime. How much was bottled up? And how would it come out?

When the telephone on his desk rang, Heinrich jumped. That happened about a third of the time. When he was really concentrating, the outside world seemed to disappear. It seemed to, but it didn't. As if to prove as much, the phone rang again.

He picked it up. Willi was laughing at him. Ignoring his friend, he used his best professional tones: "Analysis Section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking."

"Hello, Heinrich." Had Willi heard the voice on the other end of the line, he would have stopped laughing, and in a hurry: it was Erika.

"Hello." Heinrich did his best to keep his own voice normal. It wasn't easy. "What…what can I do for you?"

"I'm at my sister's house. Leonore lives at 16 Burggrafen-Strasse, just south of the Tiergarten. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes, I think so," Heinrich said automatically. Then he wished he could deny everything. Too late, of course. For wishes like that, it always was.

"Good," Erika said: another questionable assumption. "Come over at lunchtime. We need to talk."

"You, me, and your sister?" Heinrich said in surprise. He hardly knew Erika's sister. Leonore, if he remembered right, was separated from a mid-ranking SS officer. She was a year or two younger than Erika and looked a lot like her, but wasn't quite so…carnivorouswas the word that came to Heinrich's mind. He asked, "What about?"

"I'm not going to go into it on the phone," Erika said, which, considering that the lines into Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters were monitored as closely as any in the Reich, was probably a good idea.

Heinrich thought it over. If Leonore were there, things couldn't get too far out of hand. And even if they did, all he had to do was walk out. "All right," he said. "I'll see you a little past twelve." Erika hung up without another word.

Willi looked up from whatever he was working on. "Going out to lunch with Lise and her sister, eh?" he said, proving he'd been snooping.

Thank God I didn't say Leonore's name,Heinrich thought. He managed a rather sickly answering smile. That avoided the lie direct, anyhow. Willi took it for agreement. He went back to the papers scattered across his desk. Heinrich, who kept his work area almost surgically neat, wondered how Willi ever found anything. But he did. Though he had his problems, that wasn't one of them.

When Heinrich wanted to do something at lunch, the time before he could leave crawled on hands and knees. Today, when he really didn't, hours flew by. Had he done anything more than blink once or twice before he got up from his desk? If he had, it didn't feel that way. At the same time, Willi headed out the door with Ilse. That had to mean Rolf Stolle never called her back. Willi was smirking. Seeing him with the secretary made Heinrich a little less uncomfortable about paying a call on his wife, but only a little.

Why didn't I say no?Heinrich wondered, waiting for the bus that would take him up to the park. He could have stood Erika and her sister up even after saying yes, but that never occurred to him. What he said he would do, he did.

Brakes squealing, the bus stopped in front of him. He climbed aboard, stuck his account card in the slot, and then put it back in his pocket. The bus wasn't too crowded. He sat down as it pulled out into traffic.

Ten minutes later, he got off at Wichmannstrasse, a little north of Burggrafen-Strasse. When he looked across to the Tiergarten, he saw that it wasn't very crowded, either. Not surprising, on this cold, gray winter's day. A few stubborn people sat on the benches and fed the squirrels and the few stubborn birds that hadn't flown south.

Reluctantly, he turned his back on the park and walked south down Wichmannstrasse to where it branched, then turned right onto Burggrafen-Strasse. The neighborhood dated from the last years of the nineteenth century or the start of the twentieth. Time had mellowed the bricks on the housefronts. Here and there, gray or greenish or even orange lichen spread over the brickwork, as if it came not from the time of the Kaisers but from the Neolithic age.

Here was 20 Burggrafen-Strasse, here was 18…and here, looking very little different from the houses on either side, was 16. With a sour half smile, Heinrich went up the slate walkway, climbed three red-brick steps, and stood in front of a door whose ornate carved floral border spoke of Victorian bourgeois respectability. Wishing he were somewhere, anywhere, else, Heinrich rang the bell.

"It's open," Erika called. "Come on in."

He did. The entry hall was narrow and cramped. It made a dogleg to the left, so he couldn't see any of the rest of the house from the doorway. A polished brass coat-and-hat rack by the door offered a mute hint. Heinrich took it, hanging his black leather greatcoat and high-crowned cap on two of the hooks. Then, with a shrug, he went into the front room-and stopped in his tracks.

He'd seen plenty of seduction scenes in films. He'd never expected to walk into one in real life, but he did now. It was almost too perfect. A pair of champagne flutes sat on a coffee table. Behind it, on a couch, lolled Erika Dorsch. She wore something white and lacy that didn't cover very much of her and didn't cover that very well. There were no perfumes in films, either. This one-Chanel? — was devastating. "Hello, Heinrich," Erika murmured.

If he wasn't going to go forward and do what she obviously wanted him to do, he should have turned on his heel and got out of there as fast as he could. He realized that later. At the moment, captivated if not quite captured, he simply stared. "Where's your sister?" he blurted.

Erika laughed musically. She sat up, which put even more of her on display as the lingerie gave ground. "You were the one who said she'd be here," she answered. "I never did."

Heinrich thought back. She was right. He'd assumed what he wanted to assume. Maybe she'd let him-no, she'd certainly let him-do that, but she hadn't lied. The collar of his uniform shirt felt much too tight. "I'd better go," he muttered-the first half-smart thing he'd said, and it wasn't any better than half-smart.

"Don't be silly. You just got here." Erika patted the couch by her. "Sit down. Make yourself at home. Have something to drink."

He didn't. "This is…" He cast about for a word. He didn't take long to find one. "This is ridiculous. What on earth do you want with me?"

"About what you'd expect," she answered. "Do I have to draw you a picture? I don't think so-you're smart. And you'regemutlich. You're…not bad-looking." He almost laughed. Even she couldn't push it any further than that. Then venom filled her voice as she went on, "And Willi's a two-timing asshole. So why not?"

She leaned forward to pick up one of the flutes. A pink nipple appeared for a moment as the lace shifted. Then it vanished again. Heinrich hadn't added a memory to thethings I'm glad I saw even if I wasn't supposed to file since he was sixteen. He did now.

"Why not?" Erika repeated, this time making it a serious question. "Who'd know? Nobody but us, and I'd get some of my own back. Willi's probably out fucking that little whore right now."

So he was. Heinrich knew that, where Erika only suspected it. But she'd asked him why not, and he thought he owed her an answer. That was also, at best, half-smart. Again, he didn't realize it till later. His thinking, just then, was less sharp than it might have been. He said, "I love my wife. I don't want to do anything to hurt her."

Erika laughed at him. "You sound like a script from the Propaganda Ministry-except I happen to know that every Propaganda Minister from Goebbels on has screwed around on his wife whenever he got the chance. So where does that leave you?"

"Say whatever you want," he answered. "I don't think this is a good idea."

"No? Part of you does." Erika wasn't looking at his face.

Heinrich intended to have a good long talk with that part, too. The trouble was, it talked back. Unhappily, he said, "Find some other way to get even with Willi. Find some way to make him happy, if you can, and for him to make you happy, too. I know the two of you used to be."

Her eyes flashed. "You don't know as much as you think you do."

"Who ever does, when it's somebody else's marriage?" Heinrich said reasonably-he was reasonable most of the time, even when being reasonable wasn't. "But that's how it looked from the outside."

"I don't care how it looked," Erika said. "And I didn't ask you to come over here to tell you stories about my miserable marriage."

"No, you asked me to come over here so you could blow holes in it-and in mine," Heinrich said.

"Mine's already got holes in it," Erika said. Heinrich waited to see if she'd add anything about his. She didn't. Instead, she went on, "I asked you to come over so I could forget about mine for a little while."

She wouldn't forget hers. Heinrich was blind to many things that went on around him, but not to that. If this went forward, Willi would be in the back of her mind-or more likely the front of her mind-every second. She'd be gloating and laughing at him with every kiss, with every caress. Didn't she see as much herself?

He thought about asking her. While he thought, Erika lost patience. "Heinrich," she said in a voice more imperious than seductive, "are you going to make love to me or not?"

He had to fight the giggles. They wouldn't do just now. What she reminded him of was a Hitler Jugend physical-training instructor who'd always bawled out, "Well, are you going to push yourselves or not?"

"Well?" she said when he didn't answer right away. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. The giggles were very close.

He had to say something. What came out was, "I'm sorry, Erika."

"Sorry?" The heat that might have been passion turned to fury. One way or another, itwould come out. "You think you're sorry now?I'll make you sorry, God damn you! Get out of here!" She grabbed the empty champagne flute and threw it at him. He ducked. It smashed against the wall behind him. He beat a hasty retreat as she reached for the full one. That got him in the seat of the pants. It didn't break till it hit the floor.

He had his greatcoat and cap on (the cap askew) and was out the door before he realized he had a wet spot back there. He shrugged. The coat would cover it till he got back to the office, and then he could sit on it till it dried. All things considered, he would rather have eaten lunch.