In The Presence Of My Enemies

Fundamental truth? Alicia wondered about that. Till she'd learned what she really was, she'd accepted everything her teachers taught her. They all said the same things. Her books all said the same things. Didn't that mean they were all true? She'd thought so.

Where she'd believed everything, now suddenly she doubted everything. If what her teachers and the books said about Jews was a lie (and it had to be, because they said Jews were evil, and she refused to believe that about her family and its friends-she knew better), did they lie about everything else, too? Was anything they taught her the truth, anything at all? Did the Earth really go around the sun? Were four and four really eight?

She could find out about that last one. She looked down at her hands. Four fingers on each, her thumbs hidden beneath her palms. Yes, four and four really did make eight. She sighed, a little regretfully. She would have to keep all the arithmetic they'd rammed down her throat.Too bad, she thought. It wasn't her favorite subject. Everything else, though…Everything else remained up for grabs.

She had to make another surrender a few minutes later, when Herr Kessler went through the day's grammar lesson. She didn't suppose he was lying about that. People did talk the way he said they did, and they did look down their noses at what he said were mistakes.

What she felt after that was a strange mix of exaltation and terror. From now on, she was going to have to figure things out for herself if she wanted to know what was so and what wasn't. She would have to weigh and judge and decide. She would have to try to see what her teachers weren't telling her from what they did say. It wouldn't be easy. She realized that, too.

Beside her, Emma was humming to herself. Alicia didn't think the other girl even knew she was doing it. Would Emma be able to handle something like this? Alicia laughed at the very idea. Emma had the imagination of a potato. She had to believe everything the teachers said, because she couldn't think for herself. Tell her one thing was true but she had to behave as if another were, and she'd go to pieces like a broken mechanical toy.

Alicia laughed again, perhaps a little cruelly, imagining gears and springs popping out of Emma's nose and ears. That was funny, all right-too funny. "Alicia Gimpel!" the teacher shouted.

Out of the chair. At attention. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"

"Perhaps you would care to tell the whole class what you find so amusing?"

"Nothing,Herr Kessler. Please excuse me,Herr Kessler." If he swatted her…Well, if she got punished for small things, maybe no one would notice she deserved to be punished for something enormous.

"Be seated. Keep quiet."

"Ja, Herr Kessler.Danke schon, Herr Kessler."

"Lucky," Emma whispered as Alicia sat down. Alicia nodded without a word. Most of her mind was far away.If being a Jew isn'tbad, why do I deserve to be punished for it? The more she looked at it, the more complicated it got.

Lise Gimpel was chopping cabbage when Francesca came into the kitchen and waited to be noticed. She didn't have to wait long. Her mother put down the knife and said, "Hello, little one. What can I do for you?"

"Can I ask you something, Mommy?" Francesca said seriously.

"Of course you can, dear. What is it?" Lise was especially fond of her middle daughter, though she tried hard not to show it to her children or her husband. Alicia had a clear, cool intelligence very much like Heinrich's. Roxane…Lise smiled. Roxane was a law unto herself. But Francesca reminded Lise of what she'd been like when she was a little girl.

With eight-year-old solemnity, Francesca asked, "What's wrong with Alicia? She's sure been acting funny lately."

"Has she?" Lise said. "I hadn't noticed." She didn't like lying to her children. She didn't like it, but she didn't hesitate, either.

"Well, she has." Francesca rolled her eyes at adult blindness. She looked more like Lise than either of the other girls, too. Her face was broader than theirs, and her hazel eyes were a compromise between Lise's green and the brown Heinrich had passed on undiluted to Alicia and Roxane.

"Acting funny how?" Lise asked, though she had a pretty good idea.

"She doesn't want to play so much," Francesca said. "And she just stays in her room looking at books and thinking about things."

"Well, you know Alicia." Lise tried to pass it off lightly. "She gets that way sometimes." That much was true. The oldest Gimpel daughter had developed a series of enthusiasms-collecting seashells was the latest-that consumed her for days or weeks or sometimes months and then vanished as if they'd never been.

But Francesca shook her head. "It's not like that this time. Usually when she gets that way, she wants Roxane and me to get that way, too. Sheexpects us to get that way, too, and she gets mad when we don't."