laughed and teased him back, his plot was thickening nicely. 'Shall we go out to lunch?' he asked her.
'Why not?' she said.
Heinrich could have thought of any number of reasons why not, but nobody'd asked him. He went to lunch at the canteen, by himself. The meatloaf was grayish, with slices of what he hoped was hard-cooked egg scattered through it. He made the mistake of wondering what sort of meat had gone into the loaf. Then he wondered why he was eating it if he couldn't tell.
A couple of tables over, an officer looked at lunch and said, 'They don't waste anything at those camps, do they?' After that, Heinrich finished the boiled beans that came on the side, but he didn't touch the meatloaf again. He was sure the officer had to be joking. He was sure, but still…
Willi and Ilse were a long time coming back from lunch. Heinrich wondered what they were eating. Then, hastily, he wondered where they were eating. That seemed safer.
He eyed them when at last they did come back. Willi didn't look particularly smug. Ilse didn't look rumpled. That proved nothing, one way or the other. Heinrich knew as much. He eyed them anyhow. Curiosity-nosiness, to be less polite about it-wouldn't leave him alone.
Would Willi brag on the way back to Stahnsdorf? The answer turned out to be no; if there was anything to brag about, Willi concealed it. Instead, he went on and on about the havoc he intended to wreak at the bridge table. 'In your dreams,' Heinrich said sweetly.
'Sometimes dreams are better than the way things really work out,' Willi said. 'Sometimes.' And that, oracular in its ambiguity, was as close as he came to saying anything about whatever he had or hadn't done with Ilse-or perhaps about the way things had gone for him and Erika. Heinrich thought about asking him to explain, thought about it and then lost his nerve.
The next day's Volkischer Beobachter said not a word about the new Fuhrer 's speech in Nuremberg. Neither did the paper from the day after that. Had Buckliger made it? If he had, what had he said? The Beobachter, the chief Party newspaper, wasn't talking. Nor was anyone else: no one Heinrich knew, anyhow. He scratched his head, wondering what the devil that meant.
Alicia Gimpel had been helping her younger sisters with their homework ever since Francesca started going to school. Why not? She was bright, she remembered her lessons, and she'd had them only a couple of years before. Sometimes she got impatient when the younger girls didn't catch on right away. That had made Francesca angry more than once. Now Francesca helped Roxane, too-and sometimes got impatient when she didn't catch on right away. For reasons Alicia couldn't quite follow, her father and mother thought that was funny, though they'd yelled at her when she showed impatience.
She was slogging her way through reducing a page of fractions to lowest terms when Francesca came into her bedroom and said, 'I'm stuck.'
'With what?' Alicia was sick of fractions, and the one she was about to tackle-39/91-didn't look as if it would ever turn into anything reasonable. Whatever Francesca was working on had to be more interesting than arithmetic.
'I'm supposed to write a poem about Jews, and I can't think of anything that rhymes,' Francesca said anxiously.
'How long does it have to be?' Alicia asked-the automatic first question when confronting schoolwork.
'Eight lines!' By the way Francesca said it, her teacher was expecting her to turn in both parts of Faust tomorrow morning.
'What have you done so far?' Alicia asked. Sometimes her sister got brain cramps and wanted her to do all the work instead of just helping. She didn't like that.
But Francesca had a beginning. 'Jews are nasty. Jews are bad./They hurt Aryans and make them sad,' she recited in the singsong way children have with rhymes.
'That's a start, all right,' Alicia said encouragingly. 'Only six lines to go.'
'But I can't think of anything else!' Francesca wailed. 'Besides, once I've said that, what else do I need to say?'
What would happen if I told you you were writing a poem about yourself?Alicia wondered. Trouble was, she had a pretty good notion of the answer.You'd have hysterics, that's what. She'd learned the word not long before, and fallen in love with it. It sounded much grander than pitching a fit.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to forget what she'd found out earlier in the year. If she imagined she still was the way she had been then, helping with assignments like this one came easier. She said, 'Maybe you can say the same thing over again in a different way.'
'Like how?' Francesca asked, interested but doubtful.
Alicia flogged her muse and came up with a line: 'Jews were Germany's bad luck.' She eyed her sister. 'Now you find something that rhymes.'
Francesca screwed up her face as she thought. Her sudden smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. 'That's why we made them a dead duck!' she exclaimed.
It wasn't very good poetry; it rhymed, but the rhythm was off. Alicia started to say so, but then, for a wonder, held her tongue. For somebody in Francesca's grade, it would do. And criticizing it would only get Alicia more deeply involved in shaping the poem, which was the last thing she wanted. Pretending she wasn't something she was came hard enough around strangers. It was harder still with her sisters.
Francesca, inevitably, wanted more help. 'Give me another line,' she said.
'No,' Alicia said. 'Come on. You can do it yourself.'
Her sister hauled out the heavy artillery: 'I'll tell Mommy.'
It didn't work. 'Go ahead,' Alicia answered. 'You're supposed to do your own homework, and you know it.'
'You're mean!' Francesca said.
'I've got my work to do, too,' Alicia said. Compared to writing rude verses about Jews, even reducing
39/91 to lowest terms didn't look so bad. 'You're so mean! You lie and cheat!' When Francesca got angry, she didn't care what she said. She just wanted to wound.
But she didn't, not here. 'That's good,' Alicia said. Her sister gaped at her. 'That's good,' she repeated. 'That will do for another line, if you change 'you' into 'they.''
'Oh.' Francesca thought about it. The sun came out from behind the clouds once more. 'You're right. It will.' She thought a little more. 'They are so mean. They lie and cheat./And take away the food we eat.' She looked toward Alicia, who was suddenly a respected literary analyst again, for her reaction.
And Alicia nodded. She didn't think it was wonderful poetry, but she also didn't think Francesca's teacher was expecting wonderful poetry. The lesson was more about hating Jews than about writing poetry, wonderful or not. Alicia stared suspiciously at 39/91. To encourage Francesca-and to encourage her to go away-she said, 'See? Just two lines left.'
'Uh-huh.' Francesca didn't go away, but she didn't nag Alicia any more, either. Now that she'd come up with more than two lines mostly on her own, she could make others. 'We're glad they aren't here any longer./Without them, the Reich grows ever stronger.' She beamed. 'I'm done!'
'Write them all down before you forget them,' Alicia advised.
Francesca hurried off to do just that. A couple of minutes later, she cried out in despair: 'I forgot!'
Alicia remembered the deathless verses. She recited them for her sister-slowly, so Francesca could get them down on paper. Francesca even said thank you, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
Back to arithmetic. 39/91? Now, 3 went into 39 evenly, but did it go into 91? No-she could see that at a glance.They're trying to trick me, she thought.This is going to be one of those stupid fractions that doesn'treduce, that's already in lowest terms. Then, remembering that 3? 13 made 39, she idly tried dividing 13 into 91. To her surprise, she discovered she could. 3/7, she wrote on the answer sheet.
Francesca sounded like a stampeding elephant going downstairs (Roxane, who was smaller, somehow contrived to sound like an earthquake). 'Listen, Mommy!' she said from down below.
'Listen to what?' the Gimpel girls' mother asked. 'I'm fixing supper.'
'Listen to this poem I wrote,' Francesca said proudly. She didn't mention anything about help from her big sister. In most circumstances, that would have infuriated Alicia, more because of its inaccuracy than for any other reason. Here, she didn't much mind.
Her mother's voice floated up the stairs: 'All right. Go ahead.'
