In The Presence of mine Enemies

III

"Aren't you going to lunch?" asked Walther Stutzman's boss, a big, beefy fellow named Gustav Priepke.

Walther shook his head. "Not today. I'm swamped."

"You?" Priepke scratched his head. "Maybe we need more system designers. If you've got as much as you can handle, everybody else is bound to be drowning. You're the one who keeps the whole section afloat."

"Thanks." Just at that moment, Stutzman would have preferred a less enviable efficiency record. He said, "If I get a chance, I'll grab something at the office canteen later on."

His boss made a face. "Make sure you tell your wife you may never see her again first. I'm going down the street to a real restaurant instead." Off he went. The belly that hung over his belt said he liked good food, or at least lots of food.

Alone in the cubicle, Walther typed in a security code he wasn't supposed to use. Because of what he did, he had unusual access to the Reich 's electronic networks. He could have wreaked untold havoc if that were what he wanted. It wasn't. Staying invisible, and helping other people stay invisible, counted for much more.

Nobody at Zeiss Computing should have been able to access the official genealogical records of the Germanic Empire. But Walther's father had helped transfer those records from paper to computers. He'd left a few highly unofficial ways to get into them. Those wouldn't stay safe if anyone used them too often. Here, though…Here, Stutzman judged the risk worth taking.

Richard Klein's ancestry appeared on the monitor in front of him. His own father had given Richard's grandfather a perfect Aryan pedigree, at least in the database. In those terror-filled days, no one had taken the least chance with blight on a family tree. Now, though, if someone suddenly suspicious because of the dreadful misfortune that had befallen Richard's baby should compare electronic records with whatever lingered in a dusty file drawer somewhere…

"That would not be good," Walther murmured.

He went back seven generations in Klein's family and changed the entry under Religion for one of his multiple-great-grandmothers from LUTHERAN to UNKNOWN. Then he did the same thing with two of Maria Klein's even more distant ancestors. After studying his handiwork, he nodded to himself and left the genealogical records.

That should take care of it,he thought. Possible Jews so far back in the woodpile were safe. Anyone applying for the SS had to show his ancestors had been Judenfrei for longer than that, but Richard Klein, who made a good living playing the trombone, was never going to apply for that service. And finding distant ancestors who might have been Jews in his family tree and his wife's would keep the Security Police from wondering if the Kleins themselves carried their blood and their faith down through the generations.It had better, anyhow.

One more danger remained. A program on a machine somewhere in the Zeiss works recorded every keystroke every employee made. If anyone ever started wondering about one Walther Stutzman, he could go through the record and see that Walther had done things he wasn't authorized to do. He could…till Walther keyed in the phrase RED CHALK AND GREEN CHEESE. A dialog box appeared on his monitor. He entered the time he'd begun fiddling with the genealogical records and the time he'd left them. The hidden override on the keystroke monitor would substitute a copy of what he'd been doing yesterday during that period for what he'd actually done today.

He muttered to himself. This was only the third time he could remember using the override. It carried risks of its own. Those, though, were smaller than the risk of showing he was mucking about with anything connected to Jews. He couldn't think of any risk bigger than that one.

After he got back from the canteen-where lunch, Gustav Priepke notwithstanding, wasn't half bad-he called Esther. "I've taken care of the shopping," he said.

"Oh, good," his wife answered. "You'll bring home something nice for me, won't you?"

Walther laughed. "Of course. What else have I got to spend my money on?"

"That's why I love you: you have the right attitude," Esther said. They chatted for a couple of minutes. Then he hung up. He assumed any line out from the office could be tapped at any time. Esther had understood what he was telling her, though, and he didn't think anyone from the Security Police could have.

His boss stuck his head into Stutzman's cubicle. Priepke was smoking a pipe apparently charged with stinkweed. "Everything under control?" he asked.

"Everything except that." Walther pointed at the pipe. "I thought they outlawed poison gas a long time ago."

"Ha!" Priepke took it out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring. "If you ask me, it's all to the good."

"How's that?" Walther asked. He'd been kidding on the square; the pipe really was vile.

"How? I'll tell you how." Another smoke ring polluted the air. "If there are any Jews around, I'll gas 'em out." Priepke threw back his head and guffawed.

Walther laughed, too, a little more than dutifully. How many times had he heard jokes like that? More than he could count. What could he do but laugh?

The Lufthansa airliner taxied toward the terminal at Heathrow Airport. First in German and then in English, the chief steward said, "Baggage claim and customs are to your left as you leave the aircraft. You must have your baggage with you when you clear customs. All bags are subject to search. Obey all commands from customs officials. Have a pleasant stay in London."

Obey all commands. Have a pleasant stay. Susanna Weiss snorted. The steward saw no irony there. Neither did the hack who'd written his script. And neither did the hack's bosses, who'd told him what to write.

"Purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom?" a British customs man asked in accented German.

"I am here for the meeting of the Medieval English Association," Susanna replied in English. She was more fluent in his tongue than he was in hers.

Maybe she wastoo fluent, fluent enough to get taken for a fellow national despite her German passport. Whatever the reason, the customs man went through her baggage with painstaking care while other passengers headed out to the cab stand. She fumed quietly. Arguing with a petty functionary while he did his job was likely to make him more thorough, to cost more time. At last, finding nothing more incriminating than copies of Anglo-Saxon Prose and One Hundred Middle English Lyrics, the customs man stamped her passport and said, "Pass on"-still in German.

"Thank you so much," Susanna said-still in English. The sarcasm rolled off him like water off oilcoth.

She let out a sigh of relief when she saw black British taxis still waiting at the cab stand. A cabby touched the brim of his cap. "Where to, ma'am?"

"To the Silver Eagle Hotel, please," Susanna answered.

"Right y'are," he said cheerfully, and tossed her bags into what the British called the boot. He held the door open for her, closed it after her, and got behind the wheel. The cab pulled away from the curb. Susanna had a momentary qualm, as she did whenever she came to Britain. Then she remembered they did drive on the left here, and the cabby wasn't drunk or insane-or, if he was, she couldn't prove it by that.

London's sprawl was even more vast than Berlin's. The British capital also had a far more modern look than the centerpiece of the Germanic Empire. After the fight Churchill's backers had put up trying to hold the Wehrmacht out of London, not much from the old days was left standing. Susanna had seen pictures of the old Parliament building, Big Ben, and St. Paul's cathedral. Pictures were all that remained. And after the war, London had taken a generation to start rebuilding, and still hadn't finished the job. German urban planners often came here to see how their British counterparts were doing what they needed to do. Whizzing past one newish block of flats or industrial park after another, Susanna wondered why. The British had worked here with a clean slate, which no one ever would with a German city.

A graffito, gone before she could read it. Then she saw another one, painted in big blue letters on the side of a wall.LET US CHOOSE! it said. A moment later, the same message appeared again.

"What's that all about?" she asked the taxi driver.

"What's what, ma'am?"

"'Let us choose.'"

"Oh." He drove on for a few seconds, then asked, "You're…not a Brit?"

She'd fooled him into thinking she was a native speaker. This time, unlike going through customs, that pleased her enormously. What praise could be higher for someone who'd learned a foreign language? But she had to answer: "No, I just got here from Berlin."

"Oh," he said again, more portentously this time. "There's…well, there's some talk of 'ow to run the British Union of Fascists." He nodded to himself. "Yes, that's what it is, all right."

That might have been some of what it was, but not all. Having lived so much of her life hiding things from others, Susanna recognized when somebody wasn't saying everything he might have. She didn't push the cabby. If she had, he would have decided she worked for the Gestapo or some other German security outfit, and would have clammed up altogether.

Even now, almost the Biblical threescore and ten after the conquest, people on the streets here were thinner and shabbier than their German counterparts. Their gaze had a certain furtive quality to it. It wouldn't rest on any one thing for long, but flicked now here, now there. Seldom did anyone meet anyone else's eye. In Germany, people were careful about the Security Police, but most of them knew they were unlikely to draw suspicion unless they stepped out of line. Here, security agencies assumed anybody could be the enemy, and everybody knew it.

"'Ere you are, ma'am," the cabby said, pulling up in front of a glass-and-steel pile decorated, if that was the word, with an enormous eagle of polished aluminum. It wasn't quite the Germanic eagle that so often bore a swastika in its talons, but it certainly made anyone who saw it think of that eagle at first glance. "'Ope you 'ave a pleasant stay at the Silver Eagle. Your fare's four and tuppence."

Susanna handed him a crown. He pocketed the big aluminum coin stamped with the image of Henry IX on one side and the lightning bolts of the British Union of Fascists on the other. "I don't need any change," she said, "but I would like a receipt."

"Right you are. I thank you very much." He wrote one for the five shillings she'd given him, then got her bags out of the boot and set them on the sidewalk.

He was about to drive off when she pointed across the street to the even bigger and more garish hotel there. A lot of the people-almost all of them men-going in and out of that hotel were in uniforms of one sort or another. "Is that where the British Union of Fascists is holding its meeting?"

"Yes, ma'am," the taximan said. "They always gather at the Crown, they do." A crown of aluminum anodized in gold outdid even the silver eagle on Susanna's hotel for gaudiness. Before she could find any more questions, he put the cab in gear and whizzed away.

WELCOME,MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ASSOCIATION! The banner in the lobby of the Silver Eagle greeted newcomers in English, German, and French. Not all the people queuing up in front of the registration desk were tweedy professorial types, though. Close to half were hard-faced men in those not-quite-military uniforms.Overflow from the Crown, Susanna realized. This might prove a very…interesting meeting. She remembered the convention in Dusseldorf a few years before, when the medievalists had shared the hotel with a group of mushroom fanciers. She'd had the best omelette she'd ever eaten, but several of her colleagues and even more of the mushroom lovers came down sick at a feast she'd missed. Luckily, no one died, but she knew two or three professors who'd sworn off mushrooms for good.

Two British fascists in front of her talked as if they were alone in the hotel lobby. One said, "Nationalism and autonomy aren't just catchphrases to trot out on the wireless whenever morale needs a bit of pumping up."

"They'd bloody well better not be," his friend agreed. "We can run our own show here, by God. We don't need someone from the Continent to tell us how to handle the job."

The first man nodded so vehemently, his cap almost flew off his head. "That's right. Sir Oswald started banging heads almost as soon as Adolf did. If the Germans letus choose, we'll do fine. If they don't…"

Susanna didn't find out what he thought would happen then, because the pair of uniformed men reached the head of the queue and advanced on the desk clerk. A moment later, another clerk waved to Susanna.

To her relief, the hotel hadn't lost her reservation. She'd feared the fascist contingent might have had enough clout to oust the medievalists, but evidently not. "You are a German national?" the clerk asked.

"Yes, that is correct," Susanna answered. To the outside world, it was. How a Jew could feel like a German national after everything the Third Reich had done was a different question, but one each survivor wrestled with silently and alone, not in front of a registration clerk.

"Your passport, please," the man said. He was years younger than Susanna, but had shiny white teeth of perfect evenness and alarmingly pink gums: dentures. A lot of Englishmen and — women needed false teeth. Even before it was conquered, Britain hadn't been able to raise all the food it needed, and the people often preferred things like sweets and potato crisps to more nourishing food. They paid the price in dentistry.

"Here." Susanna handed him the document. He opened the red leatherette cover with the swastika-carrying eagle embossed in gold, compared her photograph to her face, and wrote the passport number in the registration book. Then he gave the passport back to her. She put it in her purse. Things were looser here than they were in France-looser here than they were for foreigners in Germany, too, for that matter. She didn't have to surrender the passport to the clerk for the duration of her stay.

He turned the registration book toward her and held out a pen. "Your signature, please. This also acknowledges your responsibility for payment. You will be in Room 1065. The bank of lifts is around the corner to your left. Here is the key." He handed it to her. "Enjoy your stay."

"Thank you," she said. As if by magic, a bellman appeared with a wheeled cart to take charge of her bags. He was a scrawny little man with-almost inevitably-bad teeth and a servile smile that put them on display. She gave him a Reichsmark when they got up to the room. The swastika-bedizened banknote brought out another smile, this one broad, genuine, and greedy. A Reichsmark wasn't much to her, but it was worth more than a pound here; ever since the war, Germany had pegged the exchange rate artificially high. The bellman did everything but tug his forelock before bowing his way out of the room.

After unpacking, Susanna took the lift back downstairs to the lobby. She shared the little car with a professor from the Sorbonne whom she knew, and with two hulking, uniformed British fascists. Professor Drumont read, wrote, and understood modern English perfectly well, but did not speak it fluently. Susanna enjoyed the chance to practice her own rusty French.

The fascists' disapproval stuck out like spines. "Bloody foreigners," one of them growled.

He was at least thirty centimeters taller than Susanna. Since she couldn't look down her nose at him, she looked up it instead."Was sagen Sie?" she inquired with icy hauteur.

Hearing her speak German as opposed to French-a losers' language-took the wind from his sails, as she'd thought it might. "Ah…nothing," he said. "I didn't mean anything by it."

She switched languages again, this time to English: "Let me see your identity card."

He didn't ask what right she had to see it. He just handed it over. She acted as if she had the right. As far as he was concerned, that put her above doubt. She studied the card, nodded coldly, pulled a notebook and pen from her handbag, and wrote something down (actually, it was "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote," but the fascist would never know-and surely wouldn't have been able to read her scrawl anyhow). Only then did she return the identity document. Trembling, the Englishman put it back in his wallet.

"Vous avez cran,"Professor Drumont remarked as both fascists dashed from the lift and hurried away.

"Guts? Me? Give me leave to doubt." Susanna shook her head. "What I have is a-how would you say it in French? — a low tolerance for being pushed around. I think that would be it."

Drumont shrugged a very Gallic shrug. "It amounts to the same thing in the end. Now, where do we register for the meeting?"

To Susanna's annoyance, they had to walk up a flight of stairs to find registration. "If I had known that, we could have got out sooner," she grumbled. "We would not have had to spend so much time in the car with thosesalauds."

"It could be that you were too hard on them," Professor Drumont said gently. "You are, after all, a German. You may not always understand the…the strains upon other folk in the Germanic Empire."

That was a brave thing for him to say, or possibly a foolish one. Somebody from one security organization or another was bound to be keeping an eye on the Medieval English Association. Susanna could have been that person, or one of those people, as easily as not. The Frenchman's words were also funny, in an agonizing way.I don't know about the strains on other folk in the Germanic Empire, eh? Well, Professor, have you ever contemplated the strains on Jews in the Empire? She doubted that. Oh, yes. She doubted it very much indeed.

And yet…Her gaze flicked over to Professor Drumont. What did he look like? A gray-haired Frenchman, nothing else. But suppose he were a Jew. How could she tell? He would no more dare reveal himself to a near-stranger than would she. Sudden tears stung her eyes. She blinked angrily as she waited to get her name badge.We might be ships passing in the night. We might be, but neither of us would ever know. And not knowing is the worst thing of all.

Heinrich Gimpel leaned back in his swivel chair. "Lunch?" he asked.

"Sounds good to me." Willi Dorsch nodded. "Where do you feel like eating today?"

"I've got kind of a yen for Japanese food," Heinrich answered. Willi made a horrible face. Heinrich needed a moment to realize what he'd said. He held up a hasty hand. "I didn't do that on purpose."

"For one thing, I don't believe you," Willi said. "For another, if you're telling the truth, that just makes it worse. Unconscious punning? If that's not enough to send you up before a People's Court, what would be?"

In spite of himself, Heinrich shivered. Few who appeared before the judges of a People's Court ever appeared anywhere else again. He pushed the dark thought out of his mind, or at least out of the front part of it. "Well,does Japanese food suit you?" he asked.

"I was going to suggest it myself, till you made me lose my appetite," Willi said. "Admiral Yamamoto's is only a couple of blocks from here. How's that sound?"

Heinrich rose-all but leaped-from his chair. "Let's go."

The Japanese who ran Admiral Yamamoto's had come to Germany ten or fifteen years earlier, to study engineering. He'd got his degree, but he'd never gone home to Tokyo. Some of the sushi he served would have got him odd looks if he had. What he called a Berlin roll, for instance, had seaweed and rice wrapped around thinly cut, spicy white radish and a piece of raw Baltic herring. It might not have been authentic, but it was good, especially washed down with beer. Heinrich ordered half a dozen, and some sashimi as well.

"I don't quite feel like raw fish today," Willi Dorsch said, and chose shrimp tempura instead. The batter in which the shrimp were fried wasn't what it would have been on the other side of the world, either, but it was tasty. In place of tempura sauce, Willi slathered the shrimp with wasabi. "It's green, not white, but it cleans out your sinuses just like any other horseradish."

"You put that much on and it'll blow off the top of your head." Heinrich used wasabi mixed with soy sauce for his sushi and sashimi, too, but not nearly so much.

"Ah, well, what difference does it make? No brains in there anyhow." Willi took a big bite, and found out what difference it made. He grabbed for his own stein to try to put out the fire. When he could speak again, he said, "I'mnot going to tell Erika about this."

"Mm," Heinrich said-the most noncommittal noise he could find. Anything that had anything to do with Erika Dorsch made him nervous. He didn't want Willi thinking he had designs on her. He didn't want her having designs on him. He didn't want…He shook his head. He couldn't say he didn't want Erika. He didn't want her enough to throw away what he was for her, and to endanger his family and friends.

When I found out I was a Jew, I knew it meant I had to watch a lot of things. I never imagined then that it would rob me of adultery, too. Such irony appealed to him.

But when he laughed, Willi asked, "What's so funny?"

He couldn't tell the truth. One thing he'd soon learned about being a Jew was always to have a cover story handy. He said, "The look on your face after you took that mouthful, that's what."

"Oh. Well, you can't really blame me," Willi Dorsch said. "If you ask me, wasabi's the first step toward what goes into atomic bombs."

That made Heinrich laugh without needing any cover story. "I wouldn't be surprised," he said, and then, looking out the window, "What's going on? Everybody's stopping. Is there a traffic accident down the street?"

"We would have heard it, wouldn't we?" Willi sent the wasabi paste a suspicious glance. "Unless this stuff made my ears ring, too."

The owner of Admiral Yamamoto's came out from the kitchen. In his accented German, he said, "Meine Damen und Herren,please excuse me for disturbing your meals, but I have just heard important news on the radio. the Fuhrer of the Germanic Empire, Kurt Haldweim, has passed away. Please accept my deepest sympathies and condolences." He bowed stiffly, from the waist, arms at his sides, and then disappeared again.

Heinrich Gimpel stared down at his half-eaten lunch. He'd known this day might be coming, yes, but he hadn't thought it would come quite so soon.

Willi took a last big bite of tempura. If the wasabi bothered him this time, he didn't let it show. He got to his feet, took out his wallet, and pulled out enough money to cover his lunch and Heinrich's. "Come on," he said, suddenly all business. "We'd better get back to the office."

"You're right." Heinrich rose, too.

Half the diners in Admiral Yamamoto's were finishing up in a hurry and getting out. That surprised Heinrich not at all. Given where the restaurant was, most of the people who lunched here would work for the Wehrmacht or the SS or the Party. Haldweim had no obvious successor. Intrigue and jockeying for position had begun years earlier, when he started having "colds." Now things would come out into the open.

"Who will it be?" Willi murmured as they hurried up the street. The same thought was uppermost in

Heinrich's mind, too.

When they got back to Adolf Hitler Platz, they saw Horst Witzleben's perfect image on the huge televisor screen on the front wall of the Fuhrer 's palace. The square was filling up fast as people got the news. Already, the large swastika flag above the palace had been lowered to half-staff. Witzleben's almost operatic voice blared from powerful speakers: "Even so soon, messages of sorrow and mourning have begun pouring in from around the world. In a moving joint tribute, the King and the Duce of the Italian Empire spoke of Kurt Haldweim as a man of power and a man of peace. The Emperor of Japan has expressed his sympathy with the German people on their loss, in which the Emperor of Manchukuo joins. The Caudillo of Spain described our beloved Fuhrer as a man of world-historical proportions, while the Peron of Argentina termed him a model for all rulers aspiring to greatness." Someone's arm slid a paper onto Witzleben's desk. The news reader glanced down at it. "And this just in: the Poglavnik of Croatia has declared a day of mourning in his country, while stating that the Fuhrer 's memory will live in the hearts of men forever."

"Nice," Willi remarked. "All that sympathy and a Reichsmark will buy me a glass of beer."

"Well, what do you expect them to say?" Heinrich asked. He knew what he would say if he had the chance.One more murderer in a line of murderers. A little smoother than the last two, but a murderer all the same. Except with Lise, he wouldn't get that chance. Even thinking such things was dangerous.

"Oh, just what they are saying," Willi answered, turning his back on the televisor. "But how many of them mean it?"

"If you had to mean what you said, we'd have an awful lot of diplomats who never opened their mouths-and the world might be a better place," Heinrich said. His friend laughed, supposing he'd been joking.

He and Willi went up the broad stairway to the entrance of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. "Identification cards," a guard snapped. Heinrich dug out his wallet and produced the card. The guard carefully compared the photo to his face before running the card through the machine reader. Only when the light glowed green did he nod for Heinrich to proceed. Willi got the same treatment.

"They aren't usually so jumpy during the lunch break," he said once they were safely inside and out of earshot of the guards.

"Did you think they wouldn't be?" Heinrich asked. "Nobody's going to trust anybody till we have a new Fuhrer. Suppose the SS tried to sneak somebody in here to find out which way the Wehrmacht will go."

"They'd be fools if they did. They'd be bigger fools if they didn't have spies in place here years ago. And we'd be fools if we didn't have spies planted over there. And the Party's watching us and the SS both. The Air and Space Ministry's likely got fingers in a few different pies, too. Maybe even the Navy-who knows?" Willi took to intrigue like a duck to water. He eyed a secretary walking past as if he thought she was spying for the SS and the Navy and the Japanese all at once: or he might have looked at her that way because she was a cute redhead in a skirt that rose almost to her knees.

Just because he was melodramatic, that didn't mean he was wrong. The Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Party surely were all spying on one another. Air and Space and the Navy were smaller players, but they could get big in a hurry if they managed to put one of their people in the Fuhrer 's palace.

Once Heinrich got back to his desk, he checked to see what was coming over the Wehrmacht computer network. Most of it was what he'd expected. The United States sent a message of condolence. So did the British Union of Fascists-with one intriguing difference. Their spokesman added that he hoped the new Fuhrer would be chosen "according to the principles set forth in the first edition of Mein Kampf."

Heinrich scratched his head. "Why is the first edition different from all other editions?" he asked Willi Dorsch. The question eerily reminded him of the one he'd asked Lise a few days earlier.Why is this night different from all other nights? Only a few people in the Germanic Empire-a handful of hidden Jews, and another handful of scholars who studied dead things-had any idea what that question meant and how it should be answered.

Willi didn't know how Heinrich's question should be answered, either. "What are you talking about?" he said.

"See for yourself." Heinrich pointed to his monitor.

Willi came around to his desk to look. "Isn't that interesting?" he said when he'd read the British message. "I don't know what the difference between the first edition and the others is, either. I didn't think there was much difference, except for cleaning up typographical errors and such."

"Neither did I," Heinrich said. The powers that be had never forbidden any edition of Mein Kampf. That strongly argued the differences between editions weren't large. But they had to be there. Otherwise, the British Union of Fascists wouldn't have specifically cited the first edition.

Like everyone else at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, he had a copy of Mein Kampf on his desk. His was, of course, the fourth edition, revised by Hitler after Britain and Russia went under. As always when he opened the book, he found his way to one passage near the end.If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of millions of real Germans, valuable for the future. But that passage was plainly old, for bythe War there Hitler had to mean World War I.Damn him, Heinrich thought wearily. He'd known what he wanted to do, what he intended to do, long before he got the chance to do it.

But what did he say about choosing a new Fuhrer? Finding out took some poking through the index. In this edition, it was exactly what anyone would have expected.The young movement is in its nature and inner organization anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects in general and in its own inner structure a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of a mere executant of other people's will and opinion. In little as well as big things, the movement advocates the principle of unconditional authority of the leader, coupled with the highest responsibility.

That was the way things had worked in the Reich for as long as Heinrich could remember, and for years before. How was the first edition of Mein Kampf different? Willi Dorsch had his copy open, too. He read aloud the passage Heinrich had just found.

"It can't be the same in the first edition," Heinrich said. "If it were-"

"But how could it be different?" Willi asked. "What other way to do things is there?" He'd said Heinrich was more content living in the world as it was, but he was the one for whom that world was water to a fish. He couldn't see beyond what was to what might be.

"There has to be something," Heinrich answered. He didn't know what it was, either, but he could see the possibility. As a Jew, he necessarily perceived the Reich from an outsider's viewpoint. Sometimes, as now, that proved useful. But he found himself longing for Willi's simple certainties at least as often.

"I think the British are just out to make trouble," Willi said now. "They're probably plotting with the Americans. The damned Anglo-Saxons have always been jealous of Germany. For years, they tried to keep the Reich from taking its rightful place in the sun. Now they're paying for it, and I say it serves them right."

He'd learned those lessons in school. So had Heinrich Gimpel. But Heinrich, for reasons of his own, had found he needed to doubt a lot of what his teachers said. As far as he could tell, Willi never doubted. Does that make him a fool, or the luckiest man I know?

"They've spent a long time paying for it," Heinrich said.

"Good," Willi Dorsch declared. "So did we."

"Well, yes." Heinrich couldn't-didn't dare-disagree with that. "Still, I do wonder what's in the first edition."

From his herringbone jacket to his long, narrow, bony face to his decaying teeth, Professor Horace Buckingham might have been a stage Englishman. Even his own countrymen had trouble following his Oxonian accent. It had made the panel discussion on Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" an ordeal for Susanna Weiss, who'd had to respond again and again to points she wasn't sure she understood.

When the panel ended, the audience applauded politely. Buckingham turned to Susanna. "I thought that went off rather well," he said. His breath was formidable, no doubt because of those mottled teeth.

"Not bad." Susanna still thought his interpretation naive, but she wasn't inclined to argue-not at close range, anyhow. A paper in a learned journal would offer her a more impersonal way to stick a knife in his scholarship, and would also give her something she could show her department chairman.

"Would you care to discuss things further over a drink?" he asked. The way he smiled said scholarship wasn't the only thing on his mind.

I don't want to be within three meters of you, let alone closer. The retort hovered on the tip of Susanna's tongue. Not without regret, she let it die there. She said, "Not now, thanks. I have no more discussions until the evening session, and nothing on the program really draws me, so I am going to go across the street. The British Union of Fascists' meeting has turned out to be fascinating, don't you think?"

"Fascinating. Indeed." Professor Buckingham departed with marked haste. At first Susanna thought that meant he had no use for fascists, which got him a point in her book despite his bad breath. Then she realized another explanation was more likely. To him, she was a German, nothing else. She knew otherwise, but he didn't. And what did a German interested in the congress of the British Union of Fascists add up to? Someone with connections to a security bureau.

Under different circumstances, that might have been funny. As things were…Susanna sighed. Buckingham would talk-what else did academics do? If the other professors at the Medieval English

Association didn't start sidling away from her, it would be a miracle, and God was depressingly stingy with miracles these days.

She went across the street to the Crown Hotel anyhow. She'd never been able to resist political drama. This was the genuine article-what Americans called, for no reason she could fathom,the real Mc Coy. On the surface, everything seemed exactly as it should have. Union Jacks and BUF flags with lightning bolts that resembled the SS runes flew at half-staff in commemoration of Kurt Haldweim. English and Scottish fascists had praised the departed Fuhrer to the skies. They'd also spent at least as much time patting one another on the back as the scholars of the MEA had done.

That was the surface. Underneath, and sometimes not so far underneath, things were different. Susanna hadn't even got into the Crown when a parade came up the street toward her. Nothing out of the ordinary there; British fascists were no less enamored of public display than their German counterparts.

But these tough-looking men in uniforms and shiny jackboots carried signs that said: REMEMBER THE FIRST EDITION! The mere idea was enough to make Susanna want to hug herself with glee. Political action mixed with textual analysis? The earnest academics at the Medieval English Association didn't know what they were missing.

To make sure their British colleagues and, more to the point, the National Socialists in Germanydid remember, other paraders carried banners that stretched from one side of the street to the other, with the relevant passages spelled out in English andauf Deutsch. The English read: IN LITTLE AS WELL AS BIG THINGS,THE MOVEMENT ADVOCATES THE PRINCIPLE OF A GERMANIC DEMOCRACY: THE LEADER IS ELECTED,BUT THEN ENJOYS UNCONDITIONAL AUTHORITY. Other banners declared,THE FIRST CHAIRMAN OF A LOCAL GROUP IS ELECTED,BUT THEN HE IS THE RESPONSIBLE LEADER OF THE LOCAL GROUP AND THE FIRST PRINCIPLE APPLIES TO THE NEXT HIGHER ORGANIZATION — THE LEADER IS ALWAYS ELECTEDand AND FINALLY,THE SAME APPLIES TO THE LEADERSHIP OF THE WHOLE PARTY.THE CHAIRMAN IS ELECTED,BUT HE IS THE EXCLUSIVE LEADER OF THE MOVEMENT. And, at the very tail of the procession, another big banner proclaimed, MEMBERS OF THE MOVEMENT ARE FREE TO CALL HIM TO ACCOUNT BEFORE THE FORUM OF A NEW ELECTION,TO DIVEST HIM OF HIS OFFICE IN SO FAR AS HE HAS INFRINGED ON THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MOVEMENT OR SERVED ITS INTERESTS BADLY.

British policemen in their blue uniforms and tall helmets stood on the sidewalk watching the fascists' procession. They didn't seem to know what to make of it. Neither did the German occupation authorities. Ifthey had decided to come out and quash it, they would have used panzers and rocket-firing fighter jets. They'd done that more than a few times in the earlier years of the occupation, though not so often lately.

As for Susanna, she marveled that the British Union of Fascists, or at least one wing of the party, had managed to find a way to call for democracy without immediately getting lined up in front of a wall and shot. How could you give a man a cigarette and a blindfold for quoting Adolf Hitler, whose words were close to Holy Writ all through the Germanic Empire? You couldn't possibly.

Susanna rapidly discovered the marchers represented one wing of the BUF, not the entire organization. More men in uniform swarmed out of a side street and attacked the men in the parade with clubs and brass knuckles. The marchers fought back with similar weapons. Other fascists rushed out of the Crown to join in the melee, on whose side Susanna wasn't sure. She had all she could do to keep from getting bowled over.

Whistles shrilling, the British bobbies waded into the fray. They flailed away with their truncheons, whacking brawlers on both sides with fine impartiality. "Break it up!" they bawled. "Break it up, you bloody sods!" But nobody on either side seemed to want to break it up.

Even as the men who extolled the first edition fought, they raised a chant in English: "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

Odd sort of battle cry,Susanna thought. But maybe it wasn't. Sure as the devil, televisor cameras from the BBC and the German RRG were filming the clash. The marchers must have known the cameras would be there; otherwise, they wouldn't have quoted from Mein Kampf in both English and German.

Police cars raced up, sirens screeching. The men inside them wore pig-snouted gas masks. They shot tear-gas canisters into the riot. Where nothing else had worked, that did. Fascists for and against the first edition fled.

So did Susanna, not quite soon enough. Her eyes were streaming and her stomach twisting with nausea when she made it back into the lobby of the Silver Eagle. The academics in there were fleeing, too, for fresh wisps of gas came in every time the doors opened.

Susanna repaired to the bar, which seemed a popular port in the storm. Of course, the bar was a popular port in the storm at every academic conference she'd ever attended. She took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. It didn't help much. The single-malt Scotch she ordered didn't help her eyes much, either, but it made the rest of her feel better.

"Dear God in heaven," said a British professor who also staggered in weeping like a fountain, "whatis going on out there?"

Susanna eyed him-blurrily. "Literary criticism," she said.

"Achtung! Form your lines!" Herr Kessler shouted as the schoolchildren got off the bus to one side of the Great Hall. He sounded more like a Wehrmacht drill sergeant than a teacher-but then, that was true a lot of the time. "Take your partner's hand! Hold your flag in your free hand! Now-forward to the end of the queue!"

Alicia Gimpel took Emma Handrick's hand. The alphabet made them line partners, as it made them sit close together. Alicia wished she were paired with someone else. Emma had cold, sweaty palms. Nothing Alicia could do about it. She imagined complaining to Herr Kessler. Imagining the paddling she would get for trying it immediately squelched the idea.

The swastika flag she held in her left hand was bordered in black, a token of mourning for the departed Fuhrer. Kurt Haldweim lay in state under the monstrous dome of the Great Hall. Along with other children from all over Berlin-from all over Germany-Alicia and her school-mates would file past his body and then line the parade route as his funeral procession went past.

"This way!" Herr Kessler shouted.

"No-over here," a uniformed attendant said, pointing in the opposite direction. "Your group is to take its place behind those bigger children." Fuming, his face beet red, the teacher led them to the right place.

"He doesn't know everything," Emma whispered, and smiled maliciously. For that, Alicia forgave her her sweaty palm.

The line moved forward with what the world had learned to call Germanic efficiency. Not even Herr Kessler could find anything to complain about there. Within twenty minutes, Alicia and her classmates had entered the Great Hall. The space under that unbelievable dome seemed even vaster within than without. The interior appointments had a simple grandeur to them. A recess clad in gold mosaic opposite the entrance broke a circle of a hundred marble columns, each twenty-five meters tall. In front of the recess, on a marble pedestal fourteen meters high, stood a German eagle with a swastika in its claws. And in front of the pedestal lay the mortal remains of Kurt Haldweim.

Floral decorations and shrubbery surrounded the casket of gilded bronze in which the Fuhrer lay in state. SS guards stood on either side of the coffin, displaying the many decorations Haldweim had won in his long, illustrious career as a soldier and National Socialists administrator. Yet try as they would, the wizards of ceremony who had staged this scene could not overcome one basic difficulty: the Great Hall altogether dwarfed the pale, still remains of the hawk-faced man who had ruled the Germanic Empire for a quarter of a century.

Haldweim had been Fuhrer far longer than Alicia had been alive; to her, then, he was as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. But the Pyramids remained, and now he was gone. If anything, his last surroundings stressed how transitory any mere man was. To make any sort of show at all, he would have had to be the size of a Brachiosaurus. Alicia had always imagined the Fuhrer as being more than a man, but here she saw at first hand it wasn't so.

Young mourners went by in a steady stream, almost close enough to touch the nearest wreaths. With a ten-year-old's instinctive love of horror, Alicia wondered what would happen if anybody did. She supposed one of those SS men-each as still now as if himself carved from stone-would suddenly spring to life and shoot the miscreant. Or maybe even that wouldn't be enough. Maybe they would drag him away to SS headquarters and take their time disposing of him.

Then she was past the display, past the coffin, past the wizened corpse inside, and walking quickly towards a door of simply human proportions that led out to Adolf Hitler Platz. The square was already filling with people either in uniform-military, Party, and SS-or in civilian mourning attire. "We won't be able to see," Emma whispered in dismay.

"Yes, we will," Alicia whispered back. "They wouldn't bring us all the way here and then hide us. Besides, they'll want people to see we're here." Televisor cameras on platforms stood out from the throng like islands in the sea. More cameras on the Great Hall, on the Fuhrer 's palace to the left, and on the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building across the street gave broader views. The building where Alicia's father worked seemed like an old friend.

She proved right, too, which always made her feel good. Officials in particularly fancy uniforms shepherded the schoolchildren into reserved spaces right next to the route of the funeral procession, which was marked off by red-and-black tape imprinted with swastikas. There the officials arranged them roughly in order of height, shortest in front, so they could all be seen to best advantage.

"Told you so," Alicia whispered. Emma stuck out her tongue.Herr Kessler coughed and glared. Emma turned pale. He wouldn't whack her in public, not on this somber occasion, but he wouldn't forget, either. When the bus took them back to Stahnsdorf…

"I have to go to the bathroom!" exclaimed a little redheaded boy who couldn't have been much older than Roxane. One of the officials took him by the hand, led him to a portable toilet, and then brought him back. Alicia giggled-but first she made sure Herr Kessler was looking the other way.

Buses and commuter trains brought more and more mourners into the Adolf Hitler Platz, until the entire immense square was full. Most of the people there wouldn't be able to see much, although the televisor screen mounted on the front of the Fuhrer 's palace showed them what they were missing. A lot of them had doubtless been ordered to come, as Alicia had, but what about the others? Did they want to be a part of history, if only a tiny part?

Alicia looked down at the German flag with the mourning border in her hand. Suddenly she wondered whyshe was supposed to be sorry Kurt Haldweim had died. He'd been Fuhrer of the Germanic Empire, yes. If she'd been all German, that would have made reason enough. A few weeks earlier, she would have thought it did. Now…Now she knew what the Germans had done toher folk.

She still felt like a German. She also felt like a Jew-and wouldn't a Jew be glad, not sorry, the German Fuhrer was dead? Not for the first time lately, she felt very confused.

Funereal music poured from speakers mounted at the edge of the square. "Everyone keep quiet and look sad,"Herr Kessler hissed.

Next to Alicia, Emma had a good reason for frowning. She just needed to think about what would happen to her when she got back to school. Alicia had to work hard to make the corners of her mouth turn down. She finally managed it the way she had in the game with her sisters: by pretending she was in a play and had to act a part.

Pallbearers wearing Army field-gray,Luftwaffe light blue, Navy dark blue, SS black, and National Socialist brown bore Kurt Haldweim's coffin out of the Great Hall and set it on a wheeled bier drawn by eight black horses that had pulled up in front of the entrance. Every one of the men was blond and handsome and close to two meters tall-and every one of them was made to seem taller still by a high-crowned cap. The pallbearers looked magnificent in closeup shots on the televisor screen at the front of the Fuhrer 's palace. Seen live, they might have been ants in front of the inhuman, overwhelming immensity of the Great Hall.

The bier set out across the Adolf Hitler Platz towards Alicia at a slow walk. It was draped in black velvet, against which the red in the German national flag stood out like blood. The pallbearers goose-stepped behind the bier. Their somber faces might have been stamped from the same mold.

Behind them came visiting heads of state, some in uniform, others wearing dark civilian garb. German military and Party functionaries followed, all in their distinctive costumes. Next came foreign ambassadors, and after them elite units from the military and Waffen — SS, from the National Socialist Party hierarchy, and from the Hitler Jugend.

When the bier was almost directly in front of Alicia, one of the horses did what horses do. Half the sorrowful schoolchildren suddenly snorted and squealed. Half the teachers hastily hissed in horror. The goose-stepping pallbearers couldn't alter their paces, not without looking bad. One of them stepped in it. He marched on past, his expression unchanged no matter what clung to the sole of his gleaming boot.

Most of the heads of states and other dignitaries evaded the unfortunate substance. By the time the soldiers and fliers and sailors and SS men and brownshirts and Hitler Youths had gone by, though, it was quite thoroughly trodden into the concrete of the square.

By then, the teachers had stopped hissing. Once Haldweim's coffin had passed, the cameras turned away from the schoolchildren. They'd served their purpose.Herr Kessler and another teacher started talking in low voices. "I wonder when we'll have a new Fuhrer, " the other man said.

"I hope it's soon," Alicia's teacher answered. "It wasn't like this when Himmler died. I remember that. Back then, everybody knew we'd stay on a steady course. Nowadays?" He shook his head. Disapproval radiated from him.

"They'll make a good choice, whoever it finally is," the other teacher said.

Herr Kessler seemed to realize he might have gone too far. "Oh, I'm sure they will," he said quickly. You never could tell who might be listening. Alicia had learned that long before she found out she was a Jew.

I could report him,she thought. The news always ran stories about heroic children who turned in evildoers they'd discovered-sometimes even their own parents. Getting rid of her bad-tempered teacher was tempting, too.

But the idea died before it was fully formed, for Alicia's next thought was,If I denounce him, they'll probably investigate me, too. She shook her head in horror of her own. How did the handful of Jews at the heart of the Germanic Empire survive? By never drawing any special notice to themselves. Perhaps someone else would report Herr Kessler, but she wouldn't. She couldn't. She didn't dare.

The last unit of brownshirts left the Adolf Hitler Platz. It began to empty, and did so almost as quickly and efficiently as it had filled. People streamed away to the buses and trains that had brought them to the square. The lines were long, but they were orderly, and they moved fast. There was next to no pushing and shoving and shouting, as Alicia's schoolbooks said there was in less enlightened parts of the world.

Again, she wondered,Are my books telling the truth? If they lied about Jews-and she had to believe they did-what else did they lie about? Had there ever been a Roman Emperor named Augustus? Was Mt. Everest really the tallest mountain in the world? Had Horst Wessel been a hero and a martyr? Were two and two truly four?

She muttered in annoyance. She'd checked her arithmetic lessons before, and they held good. But how could she test what the books said about Mt. Everest, which was far away and hard to get to, or about Horst Wessel and Augustus, who'd lived in the altogether irretrievable past? She saw no simple way.

Maybe Daddy knows,she thought as she scrambled aboard her school bus. Her father knew all sorts of strange things, many of them useless but most of them interesting or entertaining. If he didn't know these, she couldn't think of anyone who would.

Herr Kessler got on the bus. He counted the students to make sure nobody had been left behind, then grunted in satisfaction. "Everyone present and accounted for," he told the driver before returning his attention to the class. "Out of respect for the memory of our beloved Fuhrer, you will be silent-completely silent-on the return journey to Stahnsdorf. If you are not silent, you will be very, very sorry. Do you understand me?" He sounded as if he looked forward to making someone, or several someones, very, very sorry.

Alicia didn't expect anyone to respond to what was obviously a rhetorical question, but a boy held up his hand and said, "Herr Kessler!"

"Ja?" The teacher was taken aback, too.

"Herr Kessler, when will we have a new beloved Fuhrer?"

Kessler blinked. "Why, when we do, of course," he answered. Alicia had no trouble figuring out what that meant. It meant he didn't know, either.

Heinrich Gimpel suspected the highest authorities in the Reich would have suppressed the first edition of Mein Kampf if they'd thought they could get away with it. But plenty of old copies were still floating around, and word of the first Fuhrer 's startlingly subversive statements spread too wide and too fast for suppression to have any hope of success. That being so, those in high places simply sat tight, hoping the fuss would die down of its own accord.

"Who would have imagined Hitler wrote such a thing?" Heinrich said at work one morning. He didn't like talking about Hitler at all, but the first edition, despite official silence-maybe because of official silence-was so much on people's minds that not talking about it would have seemed odd. He didn't want to seem odd in any way.

"I know what it must have been," Willi Dorsch said.

"Tell me, O sage of the age," Heinrich said.

"He must have written the first edition before he got the Party fully into his hands," Willi responded. "As soon as he did, then the Fuhrerprinzip took over, and everything ran from the top down, the way it does now."

"That…makes a certain amount of sense," Heinrich said. In fact, it made more than a certain amount. Willi was shrewd, no doubt about it.

He was also smug. "You bet it does," he said. "And, if you look at things the right way, it makes the first edition an antique, too, something that's not worth getting excited about."

"Do you think that's the line they'll take?" Heinrich asked.

"I think they'll try," Willi replied. "Interesting to find out whether they can get away with it."

"What do you think?"

Willi's grin wasn't quite pleasant. "I could ask you the same question, but you've never much cared for sticking out your neck, have you?"

"Well, no." Heinrich tried to sound sheepish, not cowardly. Feeling he needed to add something to his confession, he said, "You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"Oh, I will. I can always run my mouth, or stick my foot in it, or stick my neck out for the chopper." Willi sounded happy, almost gay. He could talk about sticking his neck out because he didn't really believe the chopper would come down on it. Heinrich knew full well the chopper would descend ifhe were discovered. Willi, meanwhile, went on, "Sure, I'll tell you what I think. I think they have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. That's how things always work."

"You're probably right." Heinrich made sure he didn't sigh. He wouldn't have sworn his office was bugged, but he wouldn't have sworn it wasn't, either. If anyone was listening to him, he didn't want to do or say anything that could possibly be construed as disloyal to the Reich.

"If you bet that tomorrow will be just like today, you'll win more often than you lose," Willi said. "But you won'talways win, and you'll look more like a chump when you lose. We wouldn't have gone to Mars a few years ago if we'd thought things would stay the same all the time."

"That's true." Heinrich had been no less impressed than anyone else by live televisor pictures from another world. Men had been flying back and forth to the moon since he was a boy, and the observatory there had been a going concern for fifteen years. But Marsfelt different, even if there'd been not the slightest hint of Martians. The Ministry of Air and Space was talking about a manned mission to the moons of Jupiter. That would be something, if it ever got past the talking stage.

"So anyway," Willi said, "the people who go on about the first edition are the ones who don't have power, and the people who do have power don't give a damn about the first edition. That's the way it looks to me."

"Seems reasonable," Heinrich said, and so it did. Again, he refused to show he didn't like it, no matter how reasonable it seemed. Instead, he looked at his watch. "Shall we head for the canteen and see what sort of experiment the cooks are serving for lunch?" Nobody ever got in trouble for complaining about the food here. Not even the Security Police could afford to arrest that many people.

Today's special included tongue sausage and a cabbage salad with chopped apples, oranges, and grapes in a mayonnaise-based dressing. The sausage wasn't half bad. The menu called the salad Swedish. After a couple of bites, Heinrich called it peculiar.

Willi looked down at his foam plate. His verdict was, "I didn't know the Swedes hated us that much."

Heinrich took another forkful. After crunching away, he said, "It's probably very nutritious."

"It would be," Willi said.

Despite grumbles, they both kept eating. Heinrich sipped coffee from a foam cup. It wasn't especially good, either, but it was strong. He could feel his eyes opening wider. He wouldn't doze off at his desk this afternoon. He'd done that once or twice when he had a new baby in the house. He hadn't got in trouble. He mustn't have been the only one.

As he ate, he listened to the lunchroom chatter. Now it was official: the Americans would fall short on this year's assessment. Plenty of people at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht wondered what the Reich would do about it. Heinrich wondered himself. Someone a couple of tables over said, "The Yankees are lucky bastards. If we had a Fuhrer in place, he'd have made them knuckle under, you bet."

Willi Dorsch heard that, too. "He's right," he said, and got up to pour himself some more coffee. Heinrich nodded, though he couldn't help thinking that getting devastated by nuclear weapons and then spending the next forty years under German occupation wasn't precisely the kind of luck he most wanted to have.

On the other hand, most of the Americans remained alive. Aside from the war casualties, the conquerors had worked their usual horrors on Jews and Negroes. Even so, the population of the USA was only about a third lower than it had been before the war. Maybe the Americans as a wholewere lucky-if you compared them to such Untermenschen.

At another table not far from the one where Heinrich and Willi were sitting, a colonel growled, "To hell with the first edition! This is all a bunch of claptrap, if anybody wants to know the truth."

Heinrich took a bite of tongue sausage. Who would presume to argue with such an august personage? Willi looked smug as he came back with his refill. He must have heard the officer, too. He wagged a finger at Heinrich, as if to say,You see?

But two colonels sat at that table. The second one, a younger man, shook his head and said, "I'm not so sure, Dietrich. I've been a good Party man for more than twenty years now. If there's a way to stay in the rules and let me help choose the new Fuhrer, I'm for it."

"That's the leadership's job," the first colonel-Dietrich-said.

"Well, yes," the other colonel answered. "But how do leaders get to be leaders? If the people under them don't want to follow, what have you got? A mess, that's what. Look at France in 1940."

Dietrich snorted. "Oh, go on, Paul. If the Reich ever comes to that, we can all stick our heads in the showers, because we'll be done for anyway."

"I didn't say it would be that bad-we're not Frenchmen, after all," Paul replied. "But the principle is the same."

Another snort from the first colonel. "Principle? What's principle? Something losers talk about to explain why they've lost."

"Oh, really? Are you saying the Party has no principles?" Paul's voice was silky with danger.

But Dietrich wouldn't fall into that trap. "I'm saying victory is the first principle, and none of the others matters much." He had a fat cigar smoking in an ashtray. Now he picked it up and thrust it at his friend. "If I'm wrong, how come we shout,'Sieg heil!'? Explain that to me."

A captain who'd been siting at another table came over and said, "Excuse me, sir, but how does following the Party's original rules make victory any less likely?" He would never have had the nerve to do anything like that if Paul hadn't spoken up in favor of the first edition, not when Dietrich outranked him by three grades. As things were, he had a protector.

The table with the two colonels quickly became the day's focal point for that particular argument. Wehrmacht officers and civilian experts gathered around it. Things got more heated by the moment. Willi's face lit up. "Shall we join them?" he asked.

"Go ahead, if you want to," Heinrich answered. "But what we say won't matter a pfennig's worth either way."And that's been true everywhere in the Reichever since Hitler took over. One more good line he added to the long, long list of things he couldn't say no matter how true they were.

Sometimes a pounding on the door didn't make Lise Gimpel panic. When it came just after half past three, it made her smile. It meant the children were home from school. She hurried to the door and opened it. "Hello, girls," she said. "What did you learn today?"

"Klaus Frick eats bugs," Francesca announced.

Alicia and Roxane both made disgusted noises, but not big disgusted noises. From this, Lise concluded her middle daughter was going on with things she'd said on the school bus. The other two girls must have had the chance to start getting used to that lovely piece of news. "How do you know he eats bugs?" Lise asked, remembering how schoolyard rumors could claim anybody did anything.

But Francesca answered, "Because I saw him do it. He caught one and put it in his mouth, and it went crunch."

"And he's in your class, isn't he?" Lise said unhappily. Francesca nodded. Lise shuddered. "That's…pretty bad." Eight-year-old boys frequently were disgusting creatures, but this Klaus Frick went overboard.

Roxane giggled. "Tell her the rest!"

"The rest? There's more?" Lise said. "Do I want to know?"

"No," Alicia said quickly.

From that, Lise got a hint about whatmore might be. But Roxane was still snickering, and Francesca was laughing, too. At their age, what was disgusting was also funny. The potty jokes that had made the rounds when Lise was in the lower grades still circulated. Alicia also laughed at a lot of them; ten wasn't too old. Not today, though. Francesca said, "Klaus said-he said he was eating just like a Jew. He said Jews ate bugs all the time."

Hearing it again sent Roxane into gales of laughter. Francesca thought it was pretty funny, too. Alicia gave her verdict in one word: "Revolting."

"He's probably right, though. Jewswere revolting," Francesca said. "Everybody knows that." Her little sister nodded. Alicia started to say something, then very obviously didn't.

Lise Gimpel spoke up before her oldest daughter could slip: "Jews may have been revolting, but how does Klaus Frick know what they ate? How could he? Nobody your age has ever seen one-and I'm sure they don't teach you about bugs in school. I'm with Alicia here: Jews may have been revolting, but your classmate certainly is."

Alicia stuck out her tongue at Francesca. That was a good, healthy, normal reaction. But Roxane, always an agitator, pointed and exclaimed, "Eww! It's got a bug's leg on it!"

"Enough!" Lise said. "All three of you, go in the kitchen right now and have your snacks." She held up a warning hand. "I'm not done. The first one who says anything-anything-about bugs or Jews or anything else disgusting while you're eating is in big trouble.Big trouble, you hear me?"

They all nodded. The two younger ones hurried to the kitchen. Alicia hung back for a moment. "Jews or anythingelse disgusting?" she asked softly.

"That's how you've got to say it," Lise whispered back, biting her lip. "You have to wear a mask, remember?" Alicia nodded, though the mask had slipped. Lise gave her a little push. "Go on. Eat your snack. This was just foolishness. Don't let it worry you." Nodding again, and looking a tiny bit happier, Alicia went.

Lise Gimpel's sigh sounded amazingly like Heinrich's. You needed to have a hide like an elephant's to hope to survive. Children didn't naturally come equipped with that kind of hide. They had to acquire it, one painful scar after another. Lise remembered how many tears she'd shed when she was younger.

Jokes about Jews and gibes about Jews went on and on. Lise couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anything aboutlive Jews before those few luckless families were found in the Serbian hinterlands.

Everyone needed someone to hate. Americans hadn't hated Jews the way Europeans had, but they'd had Negroes to hate instead. Now there were hardly any Jews or Negroes in the USA. Did people on the other side of the Atlantic still tell jokes about the Negroes who weren't there any more? Lise wouldn't have been surprised. People were like that, however much you wished they weren't.

Back in the ancient days, after David slew Goliath and the Hebrews triumphed in Palestine, had they told jokes about the Philistines? That wouldn't have surprised Lise, either. She didn't think Jews were the Herrenvolk, the master race, the way Germans thought about themselves. She just thought they were people like any others, with all the faults and foibles of any other folk. Was it too much to ask for other people to see them the same way?

Evidently.

She sighed again. The survivors remaining in the Reich were well hidden. Ferreting them out wouldn't be easy, even for the Nazis. For a few years, Lise hadn't worried much about it. She hadn't even thought much about it. She'd just felt like-been-one more person living out her life like anybody else.

But then Gottlieb Stutzman got old enough to tell, and then Anna, and now Alicia. And half of Lise felt like the terrified child she'd been when she first found out the truth. Children made mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them helped children grow up. But if a Jewish child made the wrong kind of mistake, she wouldn't grow up, and what would she learn from that?

Not to be born a Jew, of course.

"Mommy!" Francesca screamed. Roxane echoed her, even higher and shriller.

Lise raced for the kitchen, her heart in her mouth. What had Alicia done? Had she told her sisters? If she couldn't keep her mouth shut, how could she think they'd be able to?

Alicia stood in the middle of the floor, her face stricken. Francesca and Roxane both dramatically pointed at her. "I'm sorry, Mommy," she whispered, her face pale as milk-pale as the milk that had been in her tumbler and now splashed all over the floor, along with the tumbler's shards.

Once Lise started to laugh, she had to work to stop. All three of her daughters stared at her. She took a deep breath, held it, let it out. "What did you think I was going to do?" she said. "Cryover spilt milk?" The girls made horrible faces. Lise didn't care about that. Relief left her giddy. "Come on. Let's clean up the mess."

She did most of the work, but she made the girls help. As she mopped up milk and swept up broken glass, she also marveled.I didn't hear the crash at all. Was I that lost in my own worries? I guess I was.

"I'm sorry," Alicia said again. No, she didn't like making any mistakes, no matter how small.

"It's all right, dear," Lise said. And, compared to what might have been, it was.