matters much.' He had a fat cigar smoking in an ashtray. Now he picked it up and thrust it at his friend. 'If I'm wrong, how come we shout,'Sieg heil!'? Explain that to me.'
A captain who'd been siting at another table came over and said, 'Excuse me, sir, but how does following the Party's original rules make victory any less likely?' He would never have had the nerve to do anything like that if Paul hadn't spoken up in favor of the first edition, not when Dietrich outranked him by three grades. As things were, he had a protector.
The table with the two colonels quickly became the day's focal point for that particular argument. Wehrmacht officers and civilian experts gathered around it. Things got more heated by the moment. Willi's face lit up. 'Shall we join them?' he asked.
'Go ahead, if you want to,' Heinrich answered. 'But what we say won't matter a pfennig's worth either way.'And that's been true everywhere in the Reichever since Hitler took over. One more good line he added to the long, long list of things he couldn't say no matter how true they were.
Sometimes a pounding on the door didn't make Lise Gimpel panic. When it came just after half past three, it made her smile. It meant the children were home from school. She hurried to the door and opened it. 'Hello, girls,' she said. 'What did you learn today?'
'Klaus Frick eats bugs,' Francesca announced.
Alicia and Roxane both made disgusted noises, but not big disgusted noises. From this, Lise concluded her middle daughter was going on with things she'd said on the school bus. The other two girls must have had the chance to start getting used to that lovely piece of news. 'How do you know he eats bugs?' Lise asked, remembering how schoolyard rumors could claim anybody did anything.
But Francesca answered, 'Because I saw him do it. He caught one and put it in his mouth, and it went crunch.'
'And he's in your class, isn't he?' Lise said unhappily. Francesca nodded. Lise shuddered. 'That's…pretty bad.' Eight-year-old boys frequently were disgusting creatures, but this Klaus Frick went overboard.
Roxane giggled. 'Tell her the rest!'
'The rest? There's more?' Lise said. 'Do I want to know?'
'No,' Alicia said quickly.
From that, Lise got a hint about whatmore might be. But Roxane was still snickering, and Francesca was laughing, too. At their age, what was disgusting was also funny. The potty jokes that had made the rounds when Lise was in the lower grades still circulated. Alicia also laughed at a lot of them; ten wasn't too old. Not today, though. Francesca said, 'Klaus said-he said he was eating just like a Jew. He said Jews ate bugs all the time.'
Hearing it again sent Roxane into gales of laughter. Francesca thought it was pretty funny, too. Alicia gave her verdict in one word: 'Revolting.'
'He's probably right, though. Jewswere revolting,' Francesca said. 'Everybody knows that.' Her little sister nodded. Alicia started to say something, then very obviously didn't.
Lise Gimpel spoke up before her oldest daughter could slip: 'Jews may have been revolting, but how does Klaus Frick know what they ate? How could he? Nobody your age has ever seen one-and I'm sure they don't teach you about bugs in school. I'm with Alicia here: Jews may have been revolting, but your classmate certainly is.'
Alicia stuck out her tongue at Francesca. That was a good, healthy, normal reaction. But Roxane, always an agitator, pointed and exclaimed, 'Eww! It's got a bug's leg on it!'
'Enough!' Lise said. 'All three of you, go in the kitchen right now and have your snacks.' She held up a warning hand. 'I'm not done. The first one who says anything-anything-about bugs or Jews or anything else disgusting while you're eating is in big trouble.Big trouble, you hear me?'
They all nodded. The two younger ones hurried to the kitchen. Alicia hung back for a moment. 'Jews or anythingelse disgusting?' she asked softly.
'That's how you've got to say it,' Lise whispered back, biting her lip. 'You have to wear a mask, remember?' Alicia nodded, though the mask had slipped. Lise gave her a little push. 'Go on. Eat your snack. This was just foolishness. Don't let it worry you.' Nodding again, and looking a tiny bit happier, Alicia went.
Lise Gimpel's sigh sounded amazingly like Heinrich's. You needed to have a hide like an elephant's to hope to survive. Children didn't naturally come equipped with that kind of hide. They had to acquire it, one painful scar after another. Lise remembered how many tears she'd shed when she was younger.
Jokes about Jews and gibes about Jews went on and on. Lise couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anything aboutlive Jews before those few luckless families were found in the Serbian hinterlands.
Everyone needed someone to hate. Americans hadn't hated Jews the way Europeans had, but they'd had Negroes to hate instead. Now there were hardly any Jews or Negroes in the USA. Did people on the other side of the Atlantic still tell jokes about the Negroes who weren't there any more? Lise wouldn't have been surprised. People were like that, however much you wished they weren't.
Back in the ancient days, after David slew Goliath and the Hebrews triumphed in Palestine, had they told jokes about the Philistines? That wouldn't have surprised Lise, either. She didn't think Jews were the Herrenvolk, the master race, the way Germans thought about themselves. She just thought they were people like any others, with all the faults and foibles of any other folk. Was it too much to ask for other people to see them the same way?
Evidently.
She sighed again. The survivors remaining in the Reich were well hidden. Ferreting them out wouldn't be easy, even for the Nazis. For a few years, Lise hadn't worried much about it. She hadn't even thought much about it. She'd just felt like-been-one more person living out her life like anybody else.
But then Gottlieb Stutzman got old enough to tell, and then Anna, and now Alicia. And half of Lise felt like the terrified child she'd been when she first found out the truth. Children made mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them helped children grow up. But if a Jewish child made the wrong kind of mistake, she wouldn't grow up, and what would she learn from that?
Not to be born a Jew, of course.
'Mommy!' Francesca screamed. Roxane echoed her, even higher and shriller.
Lise raced for the kitchen, her heart in her mouth. What had Alicia done? Had she told her sisters? If she couldn't keep her mouth shut, how could she think they'd be able to?
Alicia stood in the middle of the floor, her face stricken. Francesca and Roxane both dramatically pointed at her. 'I'm sorry, Mommy,' she whispered, her face pale as milk-pale as the milk that had been in her tumbler and now splashed all over the floor, along with the tumbler's shards.
Once Lise started to laugh, she had to work to stop. All three of her daughters stared at her. She took a deep breath, held it, let it out. 'What did you think I was going to do?' she said. 'Cryover spilt milk?' The girls made horrible faces. Lise didn't care about that. Relief left her giddy. 'Come on. Let's clean up the mess.'
She did most of the work, but she made the girls help. As she mopped up milk and swept up broken glass, she also marveled.I didn't hear the crash at all. Was I that lost in my own worries? I guess I was.
'I'm sorry,' Alicia said again. No, she didn't like making any mistakes, no matter how small.
'It's all right, dear,' Lise said. And, compared to what might have been, it was.
IV
Heinrich and Lise Gimpel were defending against a small slam in spades, doubled, that Willi Dorsch was playing. Heinrich was the one who'd doubled. With the ace of hearts in his hand, why not? One more trick after that, he thought, ought to come from somewhere. That ace had been his opening lead-whereupon he'd discovered, painfully, that Erika had a void in hearts. Willi had grinned like the Cheshire Cat when he trumped the beautiful, lost ace.
One trick for the defenders had materialized, when the clubs split evenly and Heinrich's queen survived. He couldn't see where they would come up with a second one, the one that would set the contract. His two meager trumps were gone, pulled, and Lise had had only one.
Willi led the queen of diamonds. Heinrich glumly tossed out the seven. The ace lay face-up on the table in the dummy's hand. Willi confidently didn't play it, instead choosing the three. Lise didn't even smile as she ruined the
