In The Presence Of My Enemies

Alicia jumped. Her heart leaped into her throat. How much had her little sister overheard? Enough to send her running to the Security Police because she didn't know what was what? Maybe not, or she wouldn't have asked that particular question. She must have got there just before she spoke up.

Mommy never turned a hair. "Nobody particularly notices if you give somebody a potato pancake before supper," she said, and scooped out three-one for Alicia, one for Francesca, and one for Roxane. "Be careful with them. They're hot. And Francesca, go get your little sister, so she can have one, too. Yours will cool off in the meantime."

Away Francesca ran. Alicia shared a secret smile with her mother. They knew something the smaller girls didn't. And it would stay a secret for a while, and then get told. And the chain would go on.

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.