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.
'Then they aren't sure. They can't be sure,' Susanna said. 'If they were sure, they'd haul her and her husband-and Eduard, too, damn them-off to the Genealogical Office or to the closest police headquarters and go to work on them. Thank God Eduard's too little to know what he is.'
Esther remained distraught. 'Who says they won't?'
'Nobody says they won't. But if they werereally suspicious, they would have done it already,' Susanna said. 'That means they're trying to panic people into doing something foolish so they get more to work with.'
'They're doing a pretty good job, too,' Esther exclaimed.
But Susanna shook her head. As it did with her, fear began to give way to anger. 'Not yet. Not if the Kleins can sit tight and keep saying, 'We have no idea how any of this happened.' They ought to find a lawyer, too, a big, noisy one.'
'As if a lawyer will do them any good!' Esther said. 'What lawyer in his right mind would want anything to do with somebody who might have Jewish blood? The first case he lost, he'd go to the camp along with his clients.'
'You'd think so, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. There are lawyers who deal with Mischlingsrechts, ' Susanna said. 'One of the games they play in the Party is accusing somebody they don't like of having Jewish blood. Most of the time, it's a big, fat lie, which is why the attorneys who specialize in mixed-blood lawdon't go to camps. It happened at the university a few years ago, too, which is how I happen to know about it.' She made a face, as if she'd smelled something foul. 'You wouldn't believe how nasty academic politics can get.'
'After all the horror stories you've told, maybe I would,' Esther said. Susanna had her doubts. Her friend was simply too nice to imagine the depths to which people could sink. And if that wasn't an aid to survival in the Greater German Reich, Susanna didn't know what would be.
She said, 'They ought to threaten to sue, too.'
Behind her glasses, Esther's eyes got big. 'Sue the government? They'd get shot for even thinking about it!'
Susanna shook her head again. 'No, they'd just lose or have their suit quashed before it ever came to trial. But if they talk big, if they hit back hard, people will think they must be innocent, because nobody who's guilty acts like that.'
There was, or had been, a saying in English.The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet — that was how it went. It held some truth, too. Germans who thought they had the whip hand acted like it. And those who didn't, groveled.
Esther was a quiet and quietly orderly person herself. Susanna wasn't, and never had been. She hit back whenever she could, sometimes in small ways, sometimes not. Up till now, she'd never had the chance to hit back at the Reich itself. She'd imagined it-what Jew didn't? But dreams of vengeance remained only dreams. She wasn't crazy. She knew they'd never be anything else. Still, even the prospect of tying the system up in knots looked good to her.
'Do you really think I ought to tell this to the Kleins?' Esther asked doubtfully. 'Won't it just land them in worse trouble?'
Susanna looked around. Nobody was particularly close to the two of them. No one was paying them any special heed, either. She could speak freely, or as freely as anyone could ever speak in the Greater German Reich. 'They're under suspicion of being Jews,' she said. 'How can they get in worse trouble than that?'
To her surprise, Esther actually thought it over. 'Maybe if they were homosexual Gypsies…But then they wouldn't have a baby, would they?'
'No.' Susanna fought laughter, though it was only blackly funny. The Reich had been at least as thorough about getting rid of Gypsies as it had with Jews. She didn't know whether any survived. If so, they too were in hiding. As for homosexuals, the few high up in the Party hierarchy and those who traveled in certain circles of the SS did as they pleased. Others still faced savage persecution. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, they couldn't be rooted out all at once, for they kept springing up like new weeds every year. If nothing else, they gave the authorities something to do.
'We've come all the way to the zoo,' Esther said in amazement. 'Shall we go in and look at the animals?'
'No!' Susanna startled even herself with the force of her reaction. She had to stop and think to figure out why she felt the way she did. 'I don't want to look at lions and elephants and ostriches in cages, not when I'm in a cage myself.'
'Oh.' Esther thought that over, too. After a little while, she said, 'But people like the animals. Berliners have always liked animals.' As if to prove her point, a man perhaps old enough to have served in the Second World War sat on a park bench scattering torn-up bits of bread for birds and squirrels.
'You're right, but I don't care.' Susanna stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. That was the expression Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff had come to dread. 'They're still trapped in there, and I don't want anything to do with them.'
Esther didn't argue. She'd known Susanna long enough to know how impractical arguing with her could be. She just shrugged and said, 'In that case, let's head back to your apartment.'
'All right.' Susanna was glad enough to turn around. She sighed. 'I never thought I'd wish I were living in England.'
'Why would you?' Esther asked. 'Over there, they have their own people watching them, and they have us, too.'
'But they have a party that's serious about turning over a new leaf,' Susanna answered. 'We don't. Oh, people say the new Fuhrer will be something different, but I'll believe it when I see it.'
'I hope it's true,' Esther said. 'Maybe it'll mean easier times for…everybody.' She chose the innocuous word because a man in a brown Party uniform came past them. He looked intent on his own business, but Susanna would have used an innocuous word anyplace where he could hear, too.
'Easier times,' Susanna said wistfully. 'I'll believe that when I see it, too, especially with what's going on now.' She wished she hadn't said that as soon as she did; Esther looked on the point of tears. Susanna often talked first and worried about consequences later. When she was younger, she'd thought she would outgrow it. But it seemed to be a part of her. Sometimes that landed her in trouble. Sometimes it proved very valuable. Every so often, it managed both at once. She knew she had to repair the damage here, and did her best: 'One way or another, everything will turn out all right.'
'I hope so,' Esther said, 'but I'm sure I don't see how.'
'As long as we act the way any other citizens of the Reich would if their rights were being violated, I think we'll do all right,' Susanna said.
'If we were any other citizens of the Reich, our rights wouldn't be violated,' Esther said. 'Not like this, anyhow.'
'Not like this, no,' Susanna admitted. 'But they still would be. That's what the Reich is all about: the government can do whatever it wants, and everybody else has to hold still for it. But people don't. Germans don't, anyway. If it bumps up against them, they bump back.'
