fooling herself. She'd been right about the boyfriends. About Buckliger…
The trouble with Buckliger was, he could be astonishing. She was discussing a midterm with a student who had trouble understanding why he'd got only a 73. Susanna knew why-he wasn't too bright and he hadn't studied too hard. However much she wanted to, she couldn't come right out and say that. She had the radio on, not very loud, as she went over the exam with him point by point. It was one of those painful conferences. If the student worked harder, he might get a 76 next time, or even a 78. He would never blossom and get a 92.
Susanna hardly listened to herself as she explained all the myriad ways he'd misunderstood the Old English riddles he'd tried to interpret. More of her attention was on Heinz Buckliger, who was speaking to an audience of German female pharmacists. He'd been blathering on about how pharmacists were vital for the health of the Reich, and how the women's group to which he was speaking had a long history of devoted service. It didn't seem one of his more inspired efforts.
But then, with just a few words, everything changed. Buckliger went on, 'We must examine the history of the Reich in the same way: that which is good, and also that which is not so good. We must not flinch from finding and noting our forefathers' failures.'
'Fraulein Doktor Professor, I think you should raise my grade because-'
'Wait,' Susanna said. The student tried to go on talking. She waved a hand at him. 'Hush. I want to hear this.' He couldn't very well complain, not when she was listening to the Fuhrer. He still looked…aggrieved. Susanna didn't care.
'Those who complain about the recent emphasis on the first edition of Mein Kampf ignore certain essential facts,' Heinz Buckliger went on. 'It is perfectly obvious that inadequate representation by the Volk was at the root of past illegalities, arbitrariness, and repression-crimes based on abuse of power.'
'Professor Weiss-' The student tried again.
'Hush, I told you,' Susanna snapped. The female pharmacists were applauding the Fuhrer, but hesitantly, as if they weren't sure what they were hearing. Susanna was. She just wasn't sure she could believe her ears. What Buckliger was saying was true-was, in fact, a colossal understatement. But that the Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich should say even so much…!
And Buckliger wasn't done. He said, 'The responsibility of past National Socialist leaders'-he didn't name Hitler or Himmler, but whom else could he mean? — 'and those close to them for undoubted repressions and illegalities is both difficult to forgive and difficult to admit. But we must. Even now, writers try to ignore important questions in our history. They try to pretend nothing out of the ordinary occurred. This is wrong. It neglects historical reality, of which we all must be aware.'
He paused for applause. He got…a little. Had Susanna been in the audience, she would have been on her feet whooping and hollering. The student tried to get her to pay attention to his earnest, inept essay again. She silenced him with a glare.
'Everyone's dearest wish,' Buckliger went on, 'is for the Reich and its ideology to stay unchanging for the thousand years Hitler promised us. But history does not work that way, however much we wish it did. We will either find ways to develop or we will stagnate and fail and go under.'
Murmurs said the pharmacists didn't know what to make of the hard truths Buckliger was telling them. And even the Fuhrer seemed to wonder if he'd gone too far. He quickly added, 'Fascism has offered to the world its answers to the fundamental questions of human life, at the center of which stands the Volk. The errors we may have made will not, must not, turn us from the path we embarked upon in 1933. We are traveling to the New Order, to the world of the Reich and the Volk. We shall never leave that road.'
There, at last, he gave the earnest women who'd come to hear him something they could get their teeth into. They cheered thunderously. Susanna wanted to yawn. The speech continued, but only in banalities.
'Fraulein Doktor Professor-' The student was nothing if not persistent.
'Ja, ja.' Susanna realized she would have to get rid of him so she could think. She pointed to the essay. 'You do understand that the ostensible answer to this riddle here isa key. That gets you a passing grade. But you don't see all the double meanings hiding underneath. What else might a man have on his hip that could fill a hole if he hiked up his clothes?'
'Excuse me?' The student stared at her as if she'd suddenly started spouting Hindustani. 'I'm very sorry, but-' He broke off. She could tell exactly when he did get it. His stare changed from one sort to another altogether. He blushed like a schoolgirl. Prone to such problems herself, Susanna knew a good blush when she saw one. 'But… But…' He sputtered, then tried again: 'But this…this is atext, Fraulein Doktor Professor!'
'It's a text now,' Susanna said. 'It's a text to you. But to the man who wrote it, it was a riddle, it was a joke. And if you can't see the joke, well, I'm sorry, but you don't deserve anything more than a bare pass.'
He tried to argue some more, but he couldn't, or not very well. He was both demoralized and embarrassed. Had he been a dog, he would have had his tail between his legs as he left her office.
For a wonder, no one else came in right away to complain about the exam. That left Susanna a few minutes to marvel at what she'd just heard. Heinz Buckliger had been careful about what he did. He'd surrounded the meat in his speech with clouds of puffy, obscuring rhetoric. But the meat was there. He'd admitted the Nazi regime had made mistakes. He'd also admitted it had covered them up. And he'd admitted it shouldn't have.
Once he'd done that much, gone that far, what else was left? Only spelling out what the mistakes had been. Would Buckliger have the nerve to do that? Would anyone else, now that the Fuhrer had given permission? Maybe so, if people started to see that telling the truth didn't mean a trip to a camp or a bullet in the back of the neck.
Susanna could hardly wait to find out.
Lise Gimpel was sorting laundry-a labor of Sisyphus if ever there was one-when the girls came home from school. Francesca, for once, didn't start complaining about the Beast right away. She and Roxane went into the kitchen to fix themselves snacks. Roxane opened the refrigerator. 'Olives! Yum!' she exclaimed. Her older sisters made disgusted noises. Except for Heinrich, she was the only one in the family who really liked them.
Alicia hunted up Lise instead of getting a snack. She sat down on the bed beside her and said, 'We talked about the Fuhrer 's speech in class today.'
'Did you?' Lise's mind was still more on socks and underwear than the classroom.
'We sure did.' Alicia nodded solemnly. 'Did he really say the Reich did things that were wrong, things that were against the law?'
'I think he did,' Lise answered. 'I can't say for certain, though. I didn't hear the speech.'
'Well, suppose he did.' Alicia waited till Lise nodded to show she was supposing. Her oldest daughter looked out the bedroom door to make sure Francesca and Roxane couldn't hear, then went on in a low voice, 'Does that mean he thinks the Reich was wrong about what it did to Jews?'
'I don't know,' Lise said. 'What people did to Jews wasn't against the law, though, because they made laws ahead of time that said they could do those things.'
'But it was wrong,' Alicia said fiercely.
'Oh, yes. It was wrong. I think so just as much as you do. But-' Lise broke off and put both hands on Alicia's shoulders. 'The people who run things probably don't think it was wrong. You have to remember that. And even if they say they do think it was wrong, we can't just come out and go, 'Oh, yes, here we are. Now we can get on with our lives again.''
'Why not?' Plainly, Alicia wanted to do exactly that.
'Because it might be a trap. They might be trying to lure us out so they can get rid of us once and for all. The Nazis have been killing us for almost eighty years. Why should they stop now?'
Alicia bit her lip. She was, after all, only eleven years old. 'Would they do such a thing?' she whispered.
'Would they? I don't know,' Lise answered. 'Could they? You tell me, sweetheart. What do they teach you about Jews in school?'
'Nasty things.' Alicia made a face. 'Horrible things. You know that.'
'Well, yes, I do,' Lise said. 'I wanted to make sure you did.'
'Oh.' Alicia thought that over, then nodded. 'I'm going to go get a snack before sisters eat everything good in the house.' She ran out of the bedroom and started gabbing with Francesca and Roxane. She didn't even tease Roxane about the olives. To her, they weren't part of everything good in the house, and Roxane was welcome to them.
Lise went back to stacking socks and underwear into neat piles, one for each person in the family. She
