but if you look through the Bible and pick out this and that, you can make it say anything under the sun. So I'll just say this is what we've thought for all these years, all these generations, ever since before the Maccabees, before Esther and Mordechai. It's a long, long chain of people. The Nazis almost broke it, but they didn't quite. Do you want to let them?'
'No,' Alicia said, 'not when you put it like that.' She had a child's conservatism: things that were should keep on going. And she also had her own strong sense of order, one much like her father's.
'When all you girls find out what you are, we'll be able to do a little more for Chanukah,' her mother said. 'You'll all get some Chanukahgelt for the eight nights. You're supposed to light candles, too: one the first night, two the second, and so on up to eight. I don't know if we'll ever be able to try that, though. If anybody caught us, it would be the end.'
Hiding. Doing what you could. Remembering what you were supposed to do but couldn't. Maybe one day your descendants would be able to. If they ever could, those were things they would need to know. A long, long chain of people. That was what Alicia's mother had said. Suddenly, Alicia realized she wasn't the last link on the chain. Others would come after her. One day, in the far, far future, there would be as many ahead of her as behind her-if the chain didn't break here.
'I understand,' she whispered. 'I really do.'
'Good.' Her mother flipped potato pancakes with an iron spatula. 'We make these at Chanukah, too. That's not part of the religion. It's just part of the celebration. And the nice thing is, it's safe, because people make potato pancakes all the time. Nobody particularly notices if you do.'
'Nobody particularly notices if you do what?' Francesca asked from the doorway.
Alicia jumped. Her heart leaped into her throat. How much had her little sister overheard? Enough to send her running to the Security Police because she didn't know what was what? Maybe not, or she wouldn't have asked that particular question. She must have got there just before she spoke up.
Mommy never turned a hair. 'Nobody particularly notices if you give somebody a potato pancake before supper,' she said, and scooped out three-one for Alicia, one for Francesca, and one for Roxane. 'Be careful with them. They're hot. And Francesca, go get your little sister, so she can have one, too. Yours will cool off in the meantime.'
Away Francesca ran. Alicia shared a secret smile with her mother. They knew something the smaller girls didn't. And it would stay a secret for a while, and then get told. And the chain would go on.
X
As far as Susanna Weiss was concerned, faculty new Year's parties were as dismal as they sounded. People who often didn't much like one another gathered in a place where none of them particularly wanted to be. They talked too much. They drank too much. They made passes they would have known were hopeless or offensive if they hadn't drunk too much. And they had to show up and go through the ordeal every bloody year, because if they didn't they would hear about it from the department chairman. Franz Oppenhoff had a long memory for those who disdained his hospitality. Such mistakes had blighted careers.
To add insult to injury, he served cheap scotch.
Even if it was cheap, though, it-and the schnapps, and the brandy, and the wine, and the beer-did help loosen tongues. And even if people did talk too much, there was more to talk about than usual. It wasn't just who'd published what in which academic journal, who'd been promoted or passed over, and who was sleeping with which bright and/or beautiful student. This year, for the first time in Susanna's memory and probably for the first time in old man Oppenhoff's, too, people were talking politics.
'This system has grit in the gears, but I am of the opinion that we can clean it up, lubricate it, and make it run smoothly, the way it should,' declared Helmut von Kupferstein, who was a Goethe scholar.
Susanna was of the opinion that von Kupferstein was a pompous ass. He was also thirty centimeters taller than she was, and kept threatening to drop cigarette ashes in her drink without having any idea he was doing it. She also knew he would never have dared such a thing while Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer. Still, she could say, 'I hope we can make things better,' without fearing the Security Police would haul her away five seconds later, and so she did.
Von Kupferstein-he was the sort who insisted on thevon — nodded ponderously. About a centimeter of ash from the cigarette went flying. Susanna jerked her glass aside just in time. The ash landed on the carpet. She stepped on it. He said, 'All things are possible under Heinz Buckliger. 'He who wishes to uphold the truth and has but one tongue, he will uphold it indeed.'' He looked smug at working in a quotation from Faust.
But Susanna, here, couldn't quarrel with him-except about that damned cigarette. 'This is a good attitude to have,' she said. 'We haven't always been perfectly truthful before. 'The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.'' That was a quotation, too, from Mein Kampf. She couldn't very well go wrong there.
Helmut von Kupferstein nodded in recognition. 'Oh, yes. But the National Socialists were up-and-comers then,' he said. 'Such things are beneath the dignity of those who actually rule.'
'They haven't been,' Susanna said, and walked away. If he thought indignity was the only thing wrong with lies…! But even that wouldn't have occurred to him a year earlier (or, if it had, he wouldn't have had the nerve to say it). If Buckliger was making people look at the way things were and compare them to the way they ought to be, that was a step forward.
Near the liquor-no great surprise there-Franz Oppenhoff stood pontificating to several professors not clever enough to get away but clever enough to look fascinated at the department chairman's every word. Oppenhoff said, 'Some remarkable things have happened this past year: not the least remarkable of which is that they have been allowed to happen.'
'Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!' three members of the captive audience said at the same time.
'We have been ordered to be free, and so…free we shall be.' Professor Oppenhoff stood there beaming, unconscious of any irony. The junior members of the faculty all but genuflected. That the department chairman didn't know he was being ironic frightened Susanna more than anything else.
And yet, was he so far wrong? All Heinz Buckliger had done was loosen the straps of the straitjacket a little. Susanna didn't think the Fuhrer wanted anything more than to make it fit the Reich better. But if people started trying to wiggle out of the sleeves, how could he complain? He was the one who'd made it possible in the first place.
Would they really start wiggling? The English proverb was,Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. The Reich had taken both inches and miles from Britain, forcing the metric system on it. The point remained. If the Fuhrer gave an inch…
Susanna shook her head and went over to the scotch again. If the Fuhrer gave an inch, the SS was all too likely to take it away again-and to break your fingers because you'd tried to grab it.
Professor Oppenhoff fixed himself another drink, too. The old boy had to have a liver like a sponge; he could pour down a lot of sauce without showing it. Like an old-fashioned arch-duke, he inclined his head to Susanna. 'A good New Year to you, Professor Weiss,' he rumbled, and exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke almost as toxic as mustard gas.
'Thank you, sir. The same to you.' Susanna wondered how she could get away.
'I daresay you approve of the radical changes we have seen lately,' Oppenhoff observed.
There was a not-quite-question that dropped her right in the middle of a minefield. If she denied it, he'd know she was lying. She'd always been as radical as she could be in a police state. If she admitted it, that might come back to haunt her after a crackdown. The calculations you had to make, living in such a state…
'Hard not to approve of anything that lets us inquire more openly into all sorts of things,' she said after no more than a second's silence. If she kept her answer strictly related to business, it was-she hoped-less likely to seem politically dangerous.
'Inquire more openly?' Professor Oppenhoff pondered that with a judicious puff on the cigar and another cloud of poisonous smoke. 'We in the Department of Germanic Languages have never been greatly restricted in our scholarship.'
