In The Presence Of My Enemies

Taking pity on her, Heinrich said, "His boss has brought him here. Sometimes you can't say no." He ate some french fries. They were hot and salty, and certainly lived up to the name of the place.

"He says that's how he got here, anyway," Richard Klein said, his voice sly. "I bet he was just kicking and screaming when his boss dragged him in." He was waitress-watching, too.

Maria looked at Lise. "What are we going to do with them?"

"Well, we've had them for a while by now," Lise answered. "I don't suppose they'd bring much if we traded them in on new models."

"Mm-maybe not." By the way Maria said it, it was one of those unfortunate, inconvenient facts you just couldn't get around.

Heinrich finished his burger and fries. "If Americans eat like this all the time, why don't they all weigh two hundred kilos?" he said. "I feel like I swallowed a boulder."

Richard nodded. "Me, too," he said. But when the waitress came back and asked about dessert again, they both ordered cherry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream slapped on top. So did their wives. Away went the waitress, cheerful as could be.

"Now I get it," Lise said. "They wear what they're almost wearing to get the men to order more." Heinrich wouldn't have been surprised if she was right, no matter what he'd thought a little while earlier about distractions. He hadn't been too distracted to lay out some extra Reichsmarks, had he?

He found the only defense he could: "You wanted dessert, too, sweetheart, and I don't suppose the girl's clothes had anything to do with that."

Richard Klein clapped his hands. "That's good. I wish I could come up with snappy comebacks like that."

"Don't," Heinrich told him. "They usually just get you in trouble."

"Listen to him," Maria said. "This is a man who's been married longer than you have. He knows what's what."

The waitress came back with a tray heavy with desserts. The two couples dug in. Sure enough, Heinrich made his pie disappear. Nor was he the only one facing an empty dessert plate with an expression of disbelief. "You don't need to put me on the train tonight," he said. "You can just roll me home."

"Me, too," Lise said. "Did I really do that? Tell me I didn't."

"If you didn't, then we didn't, either," Richard said. "Let's pretend the whole thing never happened."

Everybody laughed. Heinrich put money on the table, including an extra Reichsmark or two in appreciation of the waitress's outfit. As he walked out of the Greasy Spoon, he said, "I'm glad everything turned out all right," from the bottom of his heart. Then, because he was who and what he was, he added, "I wonder why it did."

Lise sent him the sort of look she always did when he came out with something like that, the look that said she wished he had better sense than to open his big mouth that way. But Richard Klein only laughed and clapped him on the back. "Hell, Heinrich," he said, "so do I."

Alicia Gimpel repeated the nonsense-sounding syllables that her father had had her memorize:"Sh'ma yisroayl adonoi elohaynu adonoi ekhod."

"That's right. That's just right." Her father nodded. "You've got the Sh'ma down very well. And do you remember what the words mean?"

"'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,'" Alicia said.

"That's right, too," her father said. "That's the most important prayer we have. It should be the last thing you ever say if, God forbid, there's a time when you have to say a last thing. We few are all that's left of Israel these days. We have to keep it going."

"I know." Alicia liked learning things in the secret language, the nearly dead language. It strengthened the feeling of belonging to a special club. "Show me the other thing again," she urged.

Her father frowned, which made him look even more serious than he usually did. "All right," he said, "but you've got to be especially careful with this. You can't let your sisters see it, not ever, and you've always got to scratch over it or tear it up into little pieces before you throw it out. That's because it says just what we are if anybody recognizes it."

"I understand. I promise." Alicia started to cross her heart, but then checked herself with the motion only half done. If she was a Jew, the cross didn't count for anything, did it? So many things to think about…

With careful attention, her father drew-wrote-four curious characters on a piece of paper: "This says adonoi -it's the name of God. Now you do it." He handed her the pen. She started to: He set his hand on hers, stopping her. "No, that's not right. Remember what I told you?"

"What do you mean? They look just like the ones you made." But then Alicia did remember. "Oh. I'm sorry. I started from the wrong end again, didn't I?" Her father lifted up his hand. She began again, writing a, a, a, and then another. "Why does it go from right to left instead of from left to right, Daddy?"