Alicia had been only a toddler then. She didn't remember her grandparents, and they'd never got to know their other grandchildren. Sometimes life seemed dreadfully unfair.
Lise laughed, not that it was funny.As if a Jew in the Third Reichshould look for fairness. But somehow God seemed extra malicious in piling a personal disaster on top of the one she'd been born with.
Alicia came into the kitchen. She liked to help cook. So did Roxane. Francesca didn't care one way or the other. Lise was glad to see her daughter. 'Hello, sweetheart,' she said. 'How did it go today?' Talking with Alicia would help ease her out of her gloom.
So she thought, anyway, till Alicia blurted, 'Mommy, do I have to be a Jew? I don't think I want to.'
Before Lise answered, she automatically looked around. 'Where are your sisters?'
'Upstairs doing homework. I finished mine.'
'All right. Good. You have to be careful even saying that word.' Lise put her hands on Alicia's shoulders. 'Now-why don't you? What happened today that made you think you don't?'
'It's not just today,' Alicia answered. 'It's everything that's happened since I found out. People just keep saying mean things-horrible things-about Jews-and everybodybelieves them. It's like they're callingme names all the time.'
'Oh, my dear.' Lise gave Alicia a squeeze. Her daughter's head already came up past her shoulder. 'I remember that, and I remember how much it hurt, too. They don't know any better, that's all.'
'But if I weren't a Jew, then it wouldn't matter any more.' Alicia could be as painfully logical as her father, though at ten she didn't always see as far as she needed to.
Lise cocked her head to one side to make sure she didn't hear one of Alicia's sisters charging downstairs at the worst possible moment. Even after she'd satisfied herself that they were busy, she needed a few seconds to marshal her thoughts. 'If you decide that's what you end up wanting, pumpkin, you can do it. You can always pretend what we told you isn't real. We said so, remember?'
Alicia nodded. 'I want to do that.'
'You can. But I have to tell you, it may not be quite so simple. If you beat eggs together to scramble them, can you separate the whites out again afterwards to make meringue?'
'Of course not,' Alicia said.
'Well, you can always live as though you're not a Jew, pretend you're not a Jew,' Lise said. 'But you'll know even so. You'll have to know. You can't very well forget, can you?'
'I can try.' Alicia screwed up her face. Lise could tell she was doing her best to pretend that that evening with the Stutzmans and Susanna had never happened. Lise could also tell, by her daughter's despairing expression, that she was having no more luck than anyone else would have. Alicia pointed an accusing finger at her. 'You and Daddy didn't tell me anything about that.'
'No, we didn't,' Lise admitted. 'We thought it would be pretty obvious-and we didn't know you wouldn't want to be a Jew.'
'I haven't got much choice, have I?' Alicia asked bleakly.
'You have a choice in the way you live.' Lise picked her words with great care. 'You haven't got a choice about what youare, not any more. When you have children, you'll have a choice about telling them what they are.'
'Why would I ever want to put anybody else through this?' Alicia said.
Were there any Jews left in the Reich who hadn't asked themselves that question at least once? Were there any who hadn't asked it a thousand times? Quietly, Lise answered, 'Because if you don't, then the Nazis win. They say we don't deserve to live, we don't deserve to be here at all. And if you don't tell your children what they are, who they are, aren't you saying you think the Nazis were right all along?'
'Weren't they?' Pain filled Alicia's voice. 'If they thought Jews were horrible, ifeverybody thought Jews were horrible, if nobody tried to stop the SS from doing what it did, maybe Jews-maybewe really were horrible. Maybe wedeserved what happened.'
That was another thought that had probably crossed every surviving Jew's mind. People saw themselves, at least in part, in the mirror their neighbors held up to them. If the mirror showed a twisted image, wouldn't they start to believe that was the way they really seemed? How could they help it?
'Some people did try to stop the SS. Not enough, though, and most of them got killed. But I don't think anybody deserves to be killed for what he is,' Lise said. 'You can't help that. If youdo something bad enough, maybe you deserve to die. That's a whole different argument, though. For just trying to live, and to get along as best you can?' She shook her head. 'No, sweetheart.'
Her daughter looked haunted. That was fair enough, too. How many millions of ghosts crowded the Germanic Empire? Better, maybe, not to try to count them all. That way lay despair. Alicia said, 'I sure hope you're right.'
So do I,Lise thought.But how can I know? How can anybody know? One thing she did know was that she had to conceal her doubts from her daughter. She said, 'Of course I am.'
'What am I going to do?' Alicia said, more to herself than to Lise.
But Lise answered her, with forced briskness: 'What are you going to do? Since you've finished your homework and your sisters haven't, you're going to take a bath. And make sure you rinse all the shampoo out of your hair and wash behind your ears. Sometimes you leave enough dirt to grow potatoes in.'
'Potatoes.' Alicia thought that was funny. She was a child; she couldn't stay gloomy for long. She went up the stairs singing, 'I'm my own vegetable garden.'
Lise envied her that ability to swing away from sadness so fast.I used to be able to do that, she thought.I wonder where it went. Wherever it went, it was gone for good now. She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She hardly ever drank when she wasn't with other people who were drinking, but today she made an exception.
When Heinrich came through the door a few minutes later, Alicia-who hadn't yet started getting rid of the potatoes-Francesca, and Roxane all swarmed downstairs to give him hugs and kisses. He needed a couple of minutes to wade through them and make his way into the kitchen. He hugged Lise and kissed her, then noticed the glass of schnapps on the counter near the sink. 'Tough day?' he asked. Lise nodded. Her husband pointed to the glass. 'Must have been. You don't usually do that. What happened?'
'Later.' Lise nodded in the direction of the children.
'Oh.' Heinrich nodded, too. He went to the cabinet for a glass of his own and also filled it full of schnapps. 'Well, here's to us.'
'To us,' Lise agreed. They both drank. Their daughters wandered into the kitchen. Roxane wanted to help. Francesca wanted to tell her father about something that had happened at school. Lise couldn't tell what Alicia wanted-maybe just to remind herself that they were a family. Alicia kept eyeing her little sisters with an expression that said,I know something you don't know.
By what she'd said to Lise a little while before, she wished she didn't.
After a while, the girls went back upstairs. 'Make sure you get clean,' Lise reminded Roxane-she'd sometimes skip a bath if she saw the chance.
'Well?' Heinrich asked.
Lise sighed. In a low, weary voice, she said, 'Alicia said she didn't want to be a Jew. She said maybe the Einsatzkommandos knew what they were doing when they got rid of us.'
'Oh. Oh, hell.' Heinrich reached for his glass of schnapps and gulped at it. The laugh that burst from him was an ugly sound, one that had nothing to do with mirth. 'Well, God knows she's not the first one of us to feel that way.'
'I understand that,' Lise said. 'But still…'
'Yes. But still.' Another swig and her husband's glass was empty. He poured it down like that about as often as Lise drank alone. With another ugly laugh, he said, 'Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an SS man when I was a little boy? Before I knew, I mean.'
'No.' Lise shook her head in astonishment. They'd been married almost fifteen years, but startling things still surfaced, like rocks working their way up through thin soil. 'No, you never said a word about that.'
'Well, I did. I thought the black uniform was the most wonderful thing in the world, and of course this wasn't too long after we beat the United States, so SS men were heroes in all the movies and televisor shows where Wehrmacht men weren't. When my father told me, I didn't want to believe him. For a long time after that-along
