In The Presence Of My Enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What might have been," Lise answered.

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

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