Willi and Lise. 'Can we get back to bridge, please?' he asked loudly.

His wife and Erika's husband both blinked, as if they were coming back to the real world. Willi said, 'I don't know why you're so impatient. We just started talking-'

'And talking, and talking,' Erika broke in, her voice acid-edged.

'Itwas fifteen minutes ago,' Heinrich said.

'Oh,Quatsch, ' Willi said. Then he looked at his watch and blinked again. He grinned a rather sickly grin. 'Oh. Well, maybe it was.' Lise seemed almost as surprised as he did.

'It's your lead, Willi, if you can think of anything besides ancient history,' Erika said.

'Let me look at the last trick, please,' Willi said, which went a long way toward proving he couldn't. He examined it, muttered to himself, and threw out a low diamond. As far as Heinrich could see, the lead might have come at random as readily as from reflection on what had gone before.

Heinrich made the contract. He and Lise went on to win the rubber, though not by nearly so much as they'd lost the first one. Shuffling for the first hand of the next rubber, Willi said, 'We'll really hammer you this time.'

'Tell me a new story,' Heinrich answered. 'I've heard this one before, and I don't believe a word of it.'

'You'll see.' Willi picked up his hand, arranged it in suits, and said, as casually as if he were asking the time, 'Three no-trump.'

'What?' Heinrich stared. His own hand didn't have opening strength, but he hadn't imagined Willi owned that kind of powerhouse. He hadn't seen a three-no opening in at least five years. He passed. So did Erika. Willi yelped and sent her a wounded look. Visions of another slam must have danced in his head. Lise passed, too. Heinrich led. Erika laid out her hand as dummy. It was ten-high-no wonder she'd passed.

Willi didn't even make the three he'd bid. With no strength on the board, he had to play everything out of his own hand, and came up one trick short. The honors bonus for all four aces more than made up for that. Even so, he let out a sorrowful sigh. 'Twenty-eight high-card points I was looking at, and down one! I'll never see another hand like that.'

The rest of the evening's bridge was less dramatic. The Gimpels and Dorsches ended up about even. As Heinrich and Lise walked to the bus stop, she asked, 'What did you and Erika talk about while Willi and I were wrangling over Babylonians?'

'Oh, nothing much,' Heinrich answered. He knew he would probably end up in trouble for not telling his wife what Erika had said. But if he did tell her, he'd end up in trouble, too.Sometimes you can't win, he thought, and kept walking.

V

After giving the flag the nationalsocialist salute, Herr Kessler led Alicia Gimpel's class in singing 'Deutschland uber Alles' and the 'Horst Wessel Song': the German and Party anthems. That wasn't part of the usual morning routine, but he explained, 'This is a special day, children, because the Reich has a new Fuhrer.' His right arm shot out again. 'Heil Buckliger!'

'Heil Buckliger!' Alicia and her classmates echoed dutifully. She hadn't known about the new Fuhrer till breakfast this morning, when her mother and father talked about him. Aunt Kathe hadn't watched Horst Witzleben, the way her parents did. Instead, she'd played with Alicia and her sisters, and sung silly songs, and told stories that were not only funny but also a good deal sassier than the ones the Gimpel girls heard from anybody else in the family.

Herr Kessler said, 'The new Fuhrer will do wonderful things for the Reich and for the Germanic Empire. He is very wise and very good and very strong. He must be all those things, or he never would have been chosen Fuhrer.'

He sounded very sure. Almost all the pupils in the classroom nodded without a moment's hesitation. Alicia nodded, too. She was learning to be a chameleon. But she couldn't help wondering,How does he know?

'Will things be any different now,Herr Kessler?' asked a boy-Alicia didn't see who.

The teacher frowned. The question was good enough that he had to answer it, but for a moment he seemed unable to find a way.Maybe nobody told him what to say, Alicia thought.He doesn't seem very good at figuring things out for himself. At last, Kessler said, 'I think things will be better. The new Fuhrer is a young man-not too much older than I am-and he is active and vigorous. The old Fuhrer was very old indeed. He was sickly and feeble. Some of you may have grandparents or great-grandparents who are like that.'

Several children nodded. Behind Alicia, Emma Handrick raised her hand. When Herr Kessler called on her, she said, 'When my great-granddad got that way, my folks took him to a Reichs Mercy Center. Is that what they did with the old Fuhrer? '

'No.Gott im Himmel, no!' The teacher turned very red. The question must have rocked him. Alicia couldn't remember him ever saying anything about God before. She couldn't remember any of her teachers saying anything about God. She'd always had the idea that they weren't supposed to.Herr Kessler needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, 'Kurt Haldweim lived out his whole life. He had to, you see, because he was serving the Reich. Do you understand?'

'Ja, Herr Kessler,' Emma answered. She wasn't going to argue with him.

Alicia wanted to. Before she found out she was a Jew, she might have. She didn't dare stick out her neck now. Not being able to say what she thought sometimes made her feel as if she were choking. She wanted to cheer when a boy stuck up his hand. When the teacher pointed his way, he asked, 'Excuse me,Herr Kessler, but if the old Fuhrer was all feeble, whydidn't they take him to a Reichs Mercy Center? Isn't that what you're supposed to do, before he becomes a burden?'

'the Fuhrer is not a burden,' Kessler said stiffly. 'the Fuhrer cannot be a burden. the Fuhrer is the Fuhrer.'

By the way he spoke, that was supposed to settle things. Nobody in the class asked any more questions about the Reichs Mercy Centers, so maybe it did. Or maybe all the children realized asking more questions like that would only land them in trouble.

And maybe Herr Kessler realized he hadn't satisfied everybody with his answers, for he quickly changed the subject and plunged into the day's usual lessons. No one could challenge him on those. He went back to being the classroom Fuhrer, lord of all he surveyed.

For the history lesson, he rolled up the usual map of the world as it was now and rolled down a different map, one that showed the way things had been before the Second and Third World Wars. 'Do you see how tiny the Reich was in those days, and how big our enemies were?' he said. 'And yet we beat them, because we were Aryans and they were full of Jews. France, England, Russia, the United States-all full of Jews. And they fell into our hands one after another. What does this tell you? Alicia Gimpel!'

She sprang to her feet. 'That Aryans are superior to Jews,Herr Kessler.'

'Very good. Be seated.'

She knew her lessons. She could recite them without fail. Reciting them when she didn't believe them, though, made her feel all slimy inside. She wanted to know what was true. She wanted to say what was true. She knew she would get in trouble if she did. That made going on with what she learned in school necessary. It didn't make it palatable.

Herr Kessler asked the next question of someone else. It was also anti-Semitic. Alicia didn't like hearing it, either. She wondered how Herr Kessler would like listening to anti-Aryan questions all day. She suspected he would get sick of it in a hurry.

She sighed. Things had been a lot simpler before she knew what she was.

When Lise Gimpel was a girl, she'd grated cabbage by hand. As often as not, that had involved grating some fingertip or knuckle in with the cabbage. Her father, an engineer, had always found that funny-they weren'this fingertips or knuckles, after all. When she yelped, he would say, 'Adds protein,' and puff on his pipe.

These days, Lise used a plastic rod to guide quartered chunks of cabbage into the maw of the food processor. The push of a button, a whir, and the job was done-not even a tenth the time, and never any need to reach for the Mercurochrome. But every time she did it, she imagined she smelled pipe tobacco.

She bit her lip. She'd been pregnant with Francesca when the damned drunk cut short her parents' lives.

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