In The Presence Of My Enemies

Susanna Weiss had lived in fear ever since she was ten years old. Fear made her angry. It always had. She'd been living with rage since she was ten, too. Most of the time, she lived with it by making everyone around her live with it. That had made her more respected-and certainly more feared-than any of the other handful of female professors in the Department of Germanic Languages. "Don't mess with her-it's more trouble than it's worth" was the watchword these days at Friedrich Wilhelm University, not just in the department but also in the administration.

Some things, though, were too big and too strong to fight.

Jews didn't-couldn't-fight the apparatus of the Nazi Party. That was as much an article of faith these days as Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Reich bestrode the world like a colossus. And we petty Jews walk under its huge legs, and peep about to escape our dishonorable graves.

Susanna knew that was a misquotation, no matter how true it was. Shakespeare, these days, was more vitally alive in Germany than in his native land. A series of splendid nineteenth-century translations left his words much closer to modern German than his original language was to modern English, which made him easier for people here to follow.

If the Reichs Genealogical Office was going to start asking questions of the Kleins…Her heart turned to a lump of ice within her. She couldn't help it, any more than a bird was supposed to be able to keep from letting a snake mesmerize it.

"Do you want to talk here?" she asked Esther Stutzman. "Or would you rather go over to the Tiergarten? It's only a couple of blocks."

Her apartment was small and cramped and full of books, and even closer to the university than to the park. It ate up an inordinately large chunk of her salary, but she couldn't think of anything on which she would rather have spent her money.

Esther set a teacup down on a table crowded with ill-informed essays on The Canterbury Tales. "Well, that depends," she said carefully, and waited.

It depends on whether you think someone has planted a microphone here. That was what she meant, all right. Susanna looked around the place. She had books in German and English and Dutch and all the Scandinavian languages (including Old Icelandic). Paintings and prints filled the wall space bookshelves didn't. An alarmingly authentic reproduction of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship stared from an end table. She was not the neatest of housekeepers. If the Security Police had sneaked in to bug the place, she would never know it till too late.

"Why don't we walk?" she said. "The park is very nice in the afternoon."

"Then let's go." Esther got to her feet.

And the Tiergartenwas very nice in the afternoon, too. The sun was bright and warm. Sparrows hopped here and there, trying to steal bread crumbs from the pigeons that pensioners fed.Germans are a strange folk, Susanna thought.They're very kind to animals. They save their savagery for people, where it really counts.

"All right," she said. "Tell me how this happened."

Esther did, flaying herself in the process. To make matters worse, she had to flay herself in a bright, cheerful voice so people walking or cycling past wouldn't wonder what the two women were talking about so intently. "If only I'd found Eduard Klein's old genealogy chart, none of this would have happened," she said, a wide, false smile on her face. "But I didn't think to look, and so the Kleins…have a problem." She could say that safely enough. Anyone might have a problem.

The problemsgoyimhave aren't so likely to be fatal. Susanna bit her lip. The Kleins would have had a fatal problem even if Esther had purloined the chart. Susanna had never heard of Tay-Sachs disease till a few weeks before, but that kind of problem didn't care whether you'd heard of it. It came right in, introduced itself, and settled down to stay.

"Too late to fret about it now," she told Esther. "It's done. We'll go on."

"Easy for you to say," Esther replied. "You didn't do it. You don't wake up in the middle of the night wishing you had it to do over again."

Susanna shrugged. "If it goes wrong, it goes wrong for me, too. If they squeeze the Kleins tight enough to get them to name you and Walther, do you think they won't name me?"

They walked past a fountain. Esther said, "I want to jump in and drown myself."

"Don't be foolish. If you're foolish, you're liable to give yourself away." Susanna paused to think. Fighting her way up through the male-dominated hierarchies at Friedrich Wilhelm University had taught her one thing: the system was there to be manipulated, if only you could find the lever. She thought she saw one here. "You say Maria told you they were being investigated?"

"That's right." Esther nodded miserably.

"And she was at home?" Susanna persisted.

"Yes." Esther nodded again.