In The Presence Of My Enemies

"What good is being a grownup?" Lise echoed. She thought of the obvious things, the things that appealed to a child-going to bed as late as you wanted to, being able to drive, having all the money you needed, getting out of school forever, not having anybody standing over you waiting to yell "No!" all the time. Then she thought about all the worries that accumulated when you grew up. When you had a family, you worried plenty even if you weren't a Jew. If you were…"What goodis being a grownup?" Lise said again. It was, when you got right down to it, a damned good question.

In the Stahnsdorf train station, Heinrich Gimpel remarked, "Never know what's in the paper these days."

"God knows that's true," Willi Dorsch agreed. "Sometimes you wonder if you want to find out, too."

They threw fifteen pfennigs apiece into the vending machine. Nothing would have stopped them from grabbing two copies of the Volkischer Beobachter when Willi opened the machine to take out his copy. Nothing would have stopped them, but it didn't occur to either man. A man had to do all kinds of things to get along in the Third Reich. That kind of petty the Ft, though, was downright un-German. Willi was a good German. In most ways, so was Heinrich.

The train got there almost as soon as they walked out on the platform. They sat down side by side and started going through the newspaper. Some of the fuss over Heinz Buckliger's speech to the pharmacists was starting to die down. Nobody'd said much in public except Rolf Stolle, the Gauleiter of Berlin, and he'd been all for it. He'd also thundered fearsome warnings about all the Bonzen who hated the very idea of reform. Heinrich thought Stolle at least as much a clown as a politician-with friends like him, who needed enemies? Clown or not, though, he probably hadn't been wrong about the Bonzen.

"Nothing too much today, doesn't look like," Willi said.

"No, I don't see anything very exciting, either." Heinrich tried not to sound too disappointed. People might wonder why he was. If the thaw ended-and he knew too well it could, knew too well it was probably going to-someone might remember. Landing in trouble for being on the wrong side of a political squabble would be just as bad for him (though perhaps not for everyone around him) as landing in trouble for being a Jew. He went on working his way through the Volkischer Beobachter. When he got to page eight, he stopped. "Hello! What's this?"

"What's what?" Willi hadn't got there yet.

"Two men arrested in Copenhagen for carrying an anti-German banner through the streets," Heinrich answered. "They wanted full independence for Denmark."

"Damn fools," Willi said. "Hell, the Danes have it, or close enough. Those idiots don't know when they're well off. They ought to go to Poland or Serbia for a while. That'd teach 'em."

"It sure would." Heinrich hoped that sounded like agreement. The Danes were better off than the Poles or the Serbs or what was left of the Russians and Ukrainians. Like Dutchmen, Norwegians, and Englishmen, Danes got credit for being Aryans. They weren't Slavic Untermenschen. They'd always been pretty peaceful-or at least resigned-under German occupation, too.

But they plainly still remembered they'd been free for hundreds of years before 1940. Heinrich wondered if…Before he could even finish the thought, Willi beat him to it: "They probably listened to the Fuhrer 's speech the other day and figured anything goes from here on out."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Heinrich said. If he had finished the thought, he would have kept quiet about it. Willi, confident about who and what he was, didn't censor himself so severely.

He didn't waste much sympathy on the Danes, either. "They're lucky theydid get arrested, not shot down on the spot. We're softer than we were in Hitler's day. I've told you that before." Then, shifting gears, he went on, "You want to have lunch today?"

"Can't," Heinrich answered. "Our goddaughter's birthday is three days from now, and I've got to find her a present." Anna Stutzman wasn't literally a goddaughter-Jews didn't use that custom-but came close enough. Heinrich couldn't resist asking, "Besides, what about Ilse?"

"I'm not eighteen, for God's sake," Willi said. "I can't do it every day any more. And I've got to save some for Erika. Otherwise, she'd be even crankier than she is."

"Generous of you," Heinrich murmured. He'd intended that for sarcasm. It didn't quite come out that way. Willi had his own inimitable style, but at least part of his heart seemed to be in the right place.

He grinned now. "Isn't it?" he said complacently. The train rattled on toward South Station in Berlin.