In The Presence of mine Enemies Read online

  "'Haman's hats,'" Alicia echoed. "I like that. Serves him right."

  "Yes," her mother said, "but that's why you won't be taking any of them to school for lunch. People who aren't Jewish might recognize them. We can't afford to take any chances at all, do you see?"

  "Not even with something as little as cakes?" Alicia said.

  "Not even," her mother said firmly. "Not with anything, not ever."

  "All right, Mama." The warning impressed Alicia with the depth of the precautions she would have to take to survive.

  "Isit all right, Alicia?" Her father sounded anxious. "I know this is a lot to put on a little girl, but we have to, you see, or there won't be any Jews any more."

  "It really is," Alicia answered. "It…surprised me. I don't know if I like it yet, but it's all right." She nodded in a slow, hesitant way. She thought she meant what she said, but she wasn't quite sure.

  She and Anna yawned together, then giggled at each other. Aunt Susanna got up, grabbed her handbag, walked over to Alicia, and kissed her on the cheek. "Welcome to your bigger family, dear. We're glad to have you."

  My bigger family,Alicia thought. That, she did like. Aunt Susanna and the Stutzmans had always been like family to her. Finding out they reallywere a family of sorts-or at least part of the same conspiracy of survival-was reassuring, in a way.

  Susanna turned to Alicia's father. "I'd better get home. I have to teach an early class tomorrow."

  "We ought to go, too," Esther Stutzman said. "Either that or we'll wait till Anna falls asleep-which shouldn't be more than another thirty seconds-bundle her into the broom closet, and leave without her." Her daughter let out an irate sniff.

  Alicia's mother and father passed out coats. The friends stood gossiping on the front porch for a last couple of minutes. As they chattered, a brightly lit police van turned the corner and rolled up the street toward the end of the cul-de-sac. "They know!" Alicia gasped in horror. "They know!" She tried to bolt inside, away from the eagle and swastika that had suddenly gone from national emblem to symbol of terror.

  Her father seized her arm. Alicia had never thought of him as particularly strong, but he held on tight and made sure she couldn't move. The van turned around and went back up the street. It turned the corner. It was gone.

  "There. You see?" her father said. "Everything's fine, little one. They can only find out about us if we give ourselves away. Do you understand?"

  "I-think so, Father," Alicia said.

  "Good." Her father let go of her. "Nowyou can go on in and get ready for bed."

  Alicia had never been so glad to go into the house in all her life.

  Susanna and the Stutzmans walked off toward the bus stop. Heinrich and Lise Gimpel went back inside the house. Once he closed the door, he allowed himself the luxury of a long sigh of mingled relief and fear. "That damned police van!" he said. "I thought poor Alicia would jump right out of her skin-and if she had, it might have ruined everything."

  "Well, she didn't. You stopped her." His wife gave him a quick kiss. "I'm going to make sure she's all right now."

  "Good idea," Heinrich said. "I'll start on the dishes." He rolled up his sleeves, turned on the water, and waited for it to get hot. When it did, he rinsed off the plates and silverware and glasses and loaded them into the dishwasher. The manufacturers kept saying the new models would be able to handle dishes that hadn't been rinsed. So far, they'd lied every time.

  Heinrich was still busy when Alicia came out for a goodnight kiss. Usually, that was just part of nighttime routine. It felt special tonight.

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

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

  He let out another sigh, even longer than the first. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment's notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. That much, Alicia had given him.

  His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the Ostlands and other, newer, ones from the USA to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, he would show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would never come, for her sake and his own.

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

  As he had with his daughter, Heinrich hung on to his wife. "And so we try to go on for another generation," he said. "We've outlasted so much. God willing, we'll outlast the Nazis, too. No matter what they teach in school, I don't believe the Reich can last a thousand years."

  "Alevaiit doesn't." Lise used a word from a murdered language, a word that hung on among surviving Jews like the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. "But, of course, now that the tale is told, the risk that we'll get caught also goes up. You did just right there, keeping her from running when the police van came by."

  "Couldn't have that," Heinrich said gravely. "But she'll be nervous for a while now, and she's so young…" He shook his head. "Strange how the worst danger comes from making sure we go on. No one would ever suspect you or me-"

  "Why else buy pork?" Lise broke in. "Why else have a Bible with the New Testament in it, too? Because we'd have to want to commit suicide if we used one that didn't, that's why."

  "I know." Heinrich knew more intimately than that: he still had his foreskin. He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and set the spectacles back on his nose. "We do everything we can to seem like perfect Germans. I can quote from Mein Kampf more easily than from Scripture. But it's not so easy for a child. I remember."

  Lise nodded. "So do I."

  "And we still have two more to go." Heinrich let out yet another sigh. He hugged her again. "I'm so tired."

  "I know," she said. "It must be easier for me, staying home with the Kinder like a proper Hausfrau. But you have to wear the mask at the office every day."

  "Either I pretend to others I'm not a Jew or I pack it in and pretend the same thing to myself. I can't do that, dammit. I know too much." He thought again of the hidden, yellowing black-and-white photographs from the east, and of the color prints from North America. "Wewill go on, in spite of everything."

  His wife yawned. "Right now, I'm going on to bed."

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

  "Did he? Good," Lise said at once. "If you must wear the mask, wear it well."

  "I suppose so. He also asked if we were busy tonight. I said yes, since we were, but we'll be going over there one evening soon."

  "I'll arrange for my sister to stay with the girls," Lise said. "Let's give Alicia a little more time to get over her shock before we take her out. And she'll realize Katarina's one of us, too, and maybe talking with her will help."

  "Sensible. You usually are."

  "Ha!" Lise said darkly. "I'd better be. So had you."

  "I know." Heinrich chuckled. "Besides, with the girls at home we'll be able to play more bridge-we won't have to ride herd on them."

  "That's true." Lise also laughed. Both of them, by now, were long used to the strangeness of having good friends who, if they learned the truth, might well want to send them to an extermination camp. Heinrichwas looking forward to getting together with Willi and Erika Dorsch for an evening of talk and bridge. Within the limits of his upbringing, Willi was a good fe
llow.

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

  "You're the one who's been standing here talking," Lise said.

  "Let's go."

  When her mother shook her awake, Alicia had to swallow a scream. Evil dreams had filled her night, dreams of being a monster in a world full of ordinary people, dreams of being taken from her parents, dreams of being taken from her parents to a place from which she would surely never return, dreams of… She didn't remember all of them. She hoped she would forget the ones she did remember.

  In the instant when her eyes came open, she thought the hand on her shoulder belonged to a man from the Security Police. The scream turned to a gasp of relief as she recognized her mother. "Oh," she said. "It's you."

  "Did you think it would be anyone else?"

  "Yes," Alicia said.

  The one flat, stark word wiped the smile from her mother's face. "Oh, little one," she said, and hugged Alicia. "Now get up and go eat your breakfast-and remember, your sisters don't know, and they mustn't know."

  "How am I supposed to hide it?" Alicia asked.

  "You have to, that's all," her mother said, which was no help at all. "Now get up and wash your face and eat breakfast and brush your teeth. You've got to be ready when the school bus gets to the stop."

  That scream wanted to come out again. Alicia couldn't imagine how she'd get through the day without revealing herself to her teacher and, even more appallingly, to her friends. But she had to try. She'd learned to swim when her father tossed her into a stream and she had to claw her way back to him or drown. So she'd thought at the time, anyhow, though of course he would have saved her if she'd got in trouble.

  But if she got in trouble here, no one would save her. No one could save her. She didn't know much about being a Jew, but that seemed all too clear.

  She wanted to stay in bed. She wanted to stay in bed forever, in fact. She couldn't, and she knew it. Her mother had already gone down the hall to wake Francesca and Roxane. And there was Francesca, mumbling and grumbling. She hated to get up in the morning. Given half a chance, she would have slept till noon every day.

  Alicia got out of bed a moment before her mother reappeared in the doorway and said, "Get moving," and then, "Oh. You are."

  "Yes, Mama." Being a Jew meant trouble. Alicia could see that. But being late to school meant trouble, too, trouble of a sort she'd known about for years. That trouble she could stay out of. The other…? To Alicia, they both seemed about the same size just then. She was ferociously bright, but she was only ten.

  She ducked into the bathroom as her sisters came out of the bedroom they shared. They would camp in the hall waiting for her, so she hurried. When she opened the door again, she pushed past them and back into her room to get dressed. That meant she didn't have to say anything much to them for a little while longer.

  Like any ten-year-old girl, she put on the tan blouse and skirt that were the uniform of the Bund deutscher Madel. She remembered how proud she'd been when she turned ten the summer before and could join the League of German Maidens like Anna and her other older friends. Putting on the uniform, with its swastika armband, was a sign she was growing up.

  As she pulled up her white socks and tied her stout brown shoes, though, the uniform suddenly seemed a lie, a betrayal.I'm not a German maiden, she thought unhappily.I'm a Jewish maiden. She shivered, though a steam radiator kept her room cozy and warm.

  On her bookshelves stood a children's classic from the early days of the Reich, Julius Streicher's Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. Like millions of German youngsters across three generations, she'd learned the difference between Aryans and Jews from the slim little volume. The blond, handsome, muscular Aryan could work and fight. The pudgy, swarthy, hook-nosed, flashily dressed Jew was the greatest scoundrel in the Reich. Alicia had believed that with all her heart. It was in a book-in every book. How could it be wrong?

  Aryan children with blond or light brown hair jeered as homely, black-haired Jewish children and a Jewish teacher were ousted from their school. A few pages later, an Aryan boy grinned and played a concertina while more ugly Jews with big noses and fleshy lips trudged into exile past a sign that said ONE-WAY STREET. The colorful pictures were so bright and cheerful, they commanded belief. Alicia had the companion volume,The Poison Mushroom, too.

  She stared at the caricatures of the Jews. She didn't look like that, nor did her sisters and parents. The Stutzmans and Susanna Weiss didn't, either. Realizing that helped steady her. If Trust No Fox had one lie in it, maybe it had lots of lies in it. With all her heart, she hoped so.

  "Alicia!" her mother called. "Hurry up! It's breakfast!"

  "Coming!" she said, and put the book away.

  "Slowpoke," said Roxane, who with Francesca was already digging in to sausages and eggs. She was the teaser in the family, always looking for ways to get under her older sisters' skins and usually finding one.

  Francesca asked the question Alicia had been dreading: "Well, what did you do when you got to stay up late last night?"

  Behind Alicia, her mother suddenly stopped bustling about the kitchen. She stood still and quiet, waiting to hear what her oldest daughter would say-and maybe to jump in and help if she had to. "It wasn't very exciting," Alicia answered, as casually as she could. "Just a lot of talk. Grownups." She rolled her eyes. If she exaggerated, it wouldn't hurt, not here. Francesca already knew what she thought of grownups.

  Her sister accepted what she said. Her mother started moving again, as if she'd only just noticed she'd stopped. And Alicia…Alicia was sunk in misery. She couldn't ever remember lying to Francesca before.

  The girls got their books and went to the bus stop on the corner. Older girls in tan uniforms like Alicia's, older boys in brown Hitler Youth togs, and younger children dressed every which way waited for the school bus. "Hello, Alicia," said Emma Handrick, who lived a few doors away. "Did you get the math homework?"

  "Sure," Alicia said, surprised Emma needed to ask; she almost always got the homework.

  "Can I copy it from you on the way to school?" Emma asked eagerly. "Please? My mother said she'd clobber me if I got another lousy grade."

  She'd asked before. Alicia had always said no. Her father and mother had taught her only to do her own work. They said anything else was dishonest. She'd gone along with that; it fit the way she thought. But today everything seemed up in the air. If she said no, would the neighbor girl denounce her as a Jew?

  Whatever else happened, that couldn't. Not just her safety rode on it. So did her sisters' and her parents'. She nodded and smiled. "All right."

  Emma's rather doughy face lit up in surprised delight. Francesca and Roxane looked horrified. Roxane had an I'm-going-to-tell expression on her face. Most of the time, that would have worried Alicia. Now she had bigger things to worry about. She felt like Atlas (her class had done Greek mythology the year before), with the weight of the heavens on her shoulders.

  The school bus stopped at the corner. The doors hissed open. The children got on. A couple of Alicia's friends waved to her. She waved back, but found a seat with Emma. Her sisters perched together on another pair of seats. Their backs were stiff with disapproval at first, but then they started talking with friends of their own and forgot Alicia's scandalous behavior-for the time being, anyhow.

  "You're a lifesaver," Emma said, her pencil racing over the paper. She finished the last problem-they were multiplying fractions-as the bus pulled into the schoolyard. "I even think I see how to do them myself."

  "That's good," Alicia said. She wasn't sure she believed it. She was pretty sure shedidn't believe it, in fact. Emma would never be one of the smartest people in the class, which was putting it mildly. But
hearing it salved Alicia's conscience.

  She put the homework back in her folder and got off the bus. Francesca and Roxane waved as they hurried to the lines in front of their classrooms. Maybe they'd forgiven her sin. Maybe. She took her own place in line-right in front of Emma, in alphabetical order.

  At precisely eight o'clock, the classroom door opened. "Come in, children," the teacher boomed.

  "Jawohl, Herr Kessler," Alicia and the rest of the class chorused. All over the schoolyard, other classes were greeting their teachers the same way. They all marched into the classrooms in perfect step-well, not quite so perfect in the younger grades.

  Again with the others, Alicia set her books and papers on her desk and stood at attention behind her chair. She faced the swastika flag that hung by the door, but her eyes were on Herr Kessler. He stood so stiff, he might have turned to stone. (Alicia thought of Perseus and the Gorgon.)

  Suddenly, the teacher's right arm shot up and out."Heil!" he barked.

  Alicia and her classmates also honored the flag with the German salute."Heil!" they said. Till this morning, she'd been proud to salute the flag. Why not? Till this morning, she'd been an Aryan among Aryans, one who deserved that privilege. Now? Now everything seemed different. No one else knew what she was, but she did, and the knowledge ate at her. Hadn't Hitler himself called Jews parasites on the nation? Alicia felt like an enormous cockroach. For a wild, frightening moment, she wondered if anyone else could see her metamorphosis.

  Evidently not.Herr Kessler got to work on grammar: which prepositions took the dative, which the accusative, and which both and with what changes of meaning. Alicia had no trouble with any of that. But some people did-Emma, for instance. Alicia knew the Handricks had the televisor on all the time; she'd heard her mother talk about it. Even so, if you listened to how educated people talked, if you paid any attention at all, how could you make mistakes? Emma did, and she wasn't the only one.Herr Kessler made notations in the roll book in red ink. Emma's mother was liable to clobber her in spite of the arithmetic homework she'd got from Alicia.

  History and geography came next. The teacher pulled down a big map of the world that hung above the blackboard. The Germanic Empire, shown in the blood-red of the flag, stretched from England deep into Siberia and India. Paler red showed lands occupied but not formally annexed: France, the United States, Canada. In the Empire's shadow were the little realms of the allied nations: Sweden's gold, Finland's pale blue, the greens of Hungary and Portugal, Romania's dark blue, purple for Spain and Bulgaria, and the yellow of the Italian Empire around the Mediterranean. Africa was mostly red, too, though Portugal, Spain, and Italy kept their colonies on the dark continent and the Aryan-dominated Union of South Africa was another ally, not a conquest.