In The Presence Of My Enemies

She tried to carry on as if nothing were wrong. When she went in to Dr. Dambach's office, she said not a word about Heinrich Gimpel. Dambach already knew she knew the Kleins. If he found out she was friends with someone else suspected of being a Jew, he might start wondering about her. The best way to stay safe was not to let anybody wonder.

"Guten Morgen, Frau Stutzman," the pediatrician said when she came in. "I was just about to start making coffee."

Those were words to alarm anybody. "Why don't you let me take care of that?" Esther said quickly. "Then you can do something, uh, useful instead."

"Well, all right," Dambach said. "As long as you're here, I'll start reviewing medical journals. With so much being published these days, it gets harder and harder to stay up to date."

"I'm sure it must," Esther said. "Yes, you get on with that, and I'll bring you some nice coffee just as soon as it's made."

"Thank you very much," he said, and went back into his private office. Esther let out a sigh of relief: one small catastrophe averted, anyhow. If only the big ones were so easy to get around.

The whole morning seemed one threatened small catastrophe after another. One by one, Esther managed and mastered them. She felt as if she were dancing between the raindrops without getting wet. Dr. Dambach had no idea most of them even turned up. Keeping him from needing to know about such things was part of her job.

When Irma Ritter came into the office at lunch, Esther did have to spend an extra five or ten minutes explaining some of the things that had gone on. "You had yourself a busy time, didn't you?" Irma said when she was through.

"One of those days," Esther answered. She made her escape and went down to the bus stop. She took a different bus from the usual; instead of going straight home, she rode up to the Kurfurstendamm to shop. Walther's birthday was coming up, and so was their anniversary.

She'd just got off the bus when a noisy parade came down the middle of Berlin's main shopping boulevard. At first, seeing the swastika placards some of the men on foot were carrying, she thought it was only another traffic-snarling Nazi procession. Then she realized she was wrong. It was a Nazi procession of sorts, but not one like any she'd ever seen. Along with the swastikas, the paraders carried placards with slogans like THROW THE RASCALS OUT! and REFORM CANDIDATES FOR THE REICHSTAG! and DOWN WITH THE PARTYBONZEN!

Men and women on the street stared. Everyone seemed as astonished as Esther was that the authorities would allow such a parade. But then people started to cheer, and to wave at the reform candidates. The politicians-many of whom were fairly prominent Party men themselves-waved back.

Esther spotted Rolf Stolle marching at the rear of the parade, and she began to understand. The Gauleiter 's bodyguards were gray-uniformed Berlin policemen, not the usual blackshirts. He carried a bullhorn. With his big, booming voice, he hardly seemed to need it.

"the Fuhrer says you can be free!" he shouted. "That's good, because you've taken too many boots in the face for too long. If you don't believe me, ask Lothar Prutzmann! the Fuhrer says youcan be free, yes. But I say youought to be free! Do you see the difference?"

Raucous cheers said the crowd on the Kurfurstendamm sidewalks did. People were less restrained now than they had been while Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer. They'd begun to see that they could say some of the things that had been on their minds for years without worrying that the Security Police would bundle them into a car and haul them off to prison or to a camp.

But they aren't Jews,Esther thought, wondering how Heinrich was holding up-and whether he was still holding out. She wondered about Alicia, too. What would they do to a child? No one had come to bundle her into a car. That was all she knew. In an important way, that was all she needed to know.

"Things will look different once we elect a real Reichstag!" Rolf Stolle roared. "Too many have got away with too much for too long. We're going to show the world where the bodies are buried-and we all know there are lots of them."

More cheers. More shouts. People around Esther waved their fists in the air. She stared at Stolle. He couldn't be talking about Jews…could he? She grimaced. Odds were against it. Plenty of Germans-and others-had gone missing during the Third Reich. Who would get excited about millions of Jews now? Odds were, no one. After the First World War, who'd got excited about all the Armenians the Turks did in? Nobody. Hitler had seen as much, and noted it in Mein Kampf. And he'd been dead right. Yes, that was the word.

"Some people-some people with fancy jobs and even fancier uniforms-are going to have a lot of explaining to do," Stolle declared. "Will they be able to do it? Good question. Damn good question. We'll find out."