he got home from the office. He didn't do that on days when things went well. Then he'd have a bottle of beer, if he had anything at all. But when she asked him what the trouble was, he jumped as if she'd poked him with a pin. 'Nothing,' he said quickly: much too quickly.
She paused, wondering where to go from there-wondering whether to go anywhere from there. But what he'd said and the way he'd said it were too blatant to ignore. She picked her words with care: 'You don't lie to me much. When you do, you aren't very good at it.'
'Oh,' he said, and then,'Scheisse.' He knocked back the schnapps at a gulp. Lise blinked. That wasn't his style at all. As if to prove it, he coughed several times. His cheeks turned pink. Embarrassment or schnapps? Schnapps, Lise judged. Heinrich coughed again, this time as if he'd started to say something and swallowed it at the last moment.
'Well, are you going to tell me about it or not?' Lise asked.
For some reason, that set her husband off again, in a different way. If his laugh wasn't hysterical, it came close. Finally, he said, 'I suppose I'd better. This is all by way of explaining how I managed to get a champagne stain on my ass this afternoon.'
Now it was Lise's turn to say, 'Oh.' She didn't know what she'd been looking for. Whatever it was, that wasn't it. 'I'm listening,' she told him, which seemed safe.
He talked. It took about ten minutes and another drink, this one gulped down as fast as the first. Lise had seen and heard for herself some of what Heinrich was talking about. At the time, she hadn't realized it applied to him in particular; she'd thought Erika was venting her spleen at the world at large. '…and that's that,' Heinrich finished. 'That, as a matter of fact, is pretty definitely that. I don't think there will be any more bridge games with the Dorsches after this.'
Bridge, just then, wasn't the first thing on Lise's mind. 'How do you feel about all this?' she asked.
'Glad it's over.' Heinrich reached for the schnapps bottle again.
That he did made Lise sure he wasn't saying everything on his mind. 'Pour some for me, too,' she told him. 'If you've earned three, I think I'm entitled to one.' After a sip, she went on, 'You kept quiet about this for months.'
'I kept hoping everything would just…settle down,' Heinrich said.
'Is that what you were hoping for?' Lise said. Erika Dorsch made formidable competition. Those cool Aryan good looks, and the suggestion of raw heat underneath…Lise took another swallow of schnapps, larger than the first. Formidable indeed.
'If I'd hoped for the other, it would have been easy enough to get.'
'Why didn't you?' she asked. 'It might have been the easiest way out of the trouble.'
Heinrich shook his head. 'My life is complicated enough. It has to be, because of what I am-what we are. If you think I want any more complications on top of that, you're crazy. And besides, I love you.'
She would have liked it better if he'd put those in the other order. Being who and what she was herself, though, she understood why he hadn't. She prodded a little, anyhow: 'And you were enjoying yourself, weren't you, with a, a beautiful woman'-there, she'd said it-'falling all over you?'
'I might have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more if I hadn't been scared to death all the damn time,' he said. 'This is mylife we're talking about, mine and lots of other people's. I hope I'm not stupid enough to put that on the line for a roll in the hay. If-' He drank instead of finishing.
'If what?' Lise asked. Her husband didn't answer. He peered out the kitchen window, resolutely pretending he hadn't heard. Lise almost repeated the question. But she could make a good guess at what he'd swallowed. It would have been something like,If I weren't a Jew, or if she were…
She supposed she could get angry at him for even that much. What was the point, though? Things were the way they were. There was no world where Heinrich was agoy or Erika a Jew.A good thing, too, Lise thought, and finished her schnapps with a gulp. She poured the glass full again.
'We're both going to go to sleep in the middle of supper,' Heinrich said.
'That's all right. That's the least of my worries right now,' Lise answered. 'You turned her down. She's going to be angry-you said so yourself. What can she do to you? What can she do to us?'
'I thought about that,' Heinrich said. 'I can't see anything. Can you? She's not going to pour gasoline on the house and set it on fire, or anything like that.'
'I suppose not,' Lise admitted. She didn't stop worrying, though. How could any Jew in her right mind stop worrying? If you weren't worrying, you were likely to miss something that might kill you.
'Is it all right?' Heinrich asked anxiously.
'It could be better,' Lise said, and he flinched. Considering all the things that might have happened, and all the different kinds of unpleasantness that might have sprung from them, she decided she had to relent, and she did: 'It could be worse, too. So I guess it's all right. But if any more beautiful blondes make a play for you, you might want to let me know a little sooner.'
'I promise,' he said.
She snorted. 'Or, of course, you might not want to let me know at all. But I hope you do.' He had no answer for that, which was, in its own way, reassuring.
When Susanna Weiss watched Czechs demonstrating on the televisor without getting arrested, she was astonished. When she saw Frenchmen demonstrating, she was shocked. But there they were, marching by the Arc de Triomphe with signs that said 'LIBERTY,EQUALITY,FRATERNITY!' That slogan had been outlawed for seventy years. Ever since 1940, the motto of the French state had been Work, Family, Country. But, while the older phrase might have been forbidden, it hadn't been forgotten. Here it was, for all the world to see.
As in Prague, policemen stood around watching without doing anything. In their round, flat-crowned kepis, they looked even more French than the demonstrators. But they collaborated with the Reich more enthusiastically than the Czechs did-or they had up till now, anyhow.
For the French, collaboration had meant survival. To Germany, Czechoslovakia had been an annoyance. France had been the deadly foe. Crushed in 1870, avenged in 1918, she'd been crushed once more in 1940 and never allowed to get off her knees again. From that day till this, French Fascists had toed the German line. Anyone who didn't toe the line disappeared, mostly forever. When Germany spat, France swam. But while she swam, she breathed, if softly.
And now, with anyone who'd lived under liberty, equality, and fraternity a white-haired ancient, these Frenchmen-and a few Frenchwomen, too-showed they remembered them. And they got away with it. Susanna stared and stared.
Horst Witzleben said, 'This peaceful demonstration was photographed by a German cameraman. No French televisor coverage was on the scene. The French regime would sooner not admit its citizens can find fault with it.'
Susanna stuck a finger in her ear. 'Did I really hear that?' she asked. No one was in the apartment with her but the cat, and Gawain, fat, lazy thing that he was, lay asleep on the sofa, his tail curled over the tip of his nose. But Susanna had to ask somebody. Germans had been making scornful gibes about Frenchmen since the very beginnings of the Reich, and no doubt long before. Still, Susanna had never heard one like this. It said,We're going somewhere new, and you haven't got the nerve to follow us.
The next story was about corruption in the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party. Susanna had no trouble believing there was corruption in the Iron Guard. They'd held power for a long time, and corruption wasn't rare in the Balkans (or, come to that, anywhere else). Talking about it was. When a fat Iron Guard official who spoke German with a comic-opera accent spluttered out denials, he did his cause more harm than any accuser could have.
She wondered if the story after the St. Pauli Girl beer advertisement would be subversive, too, but it wasn't: it talked about the Brazilian football team, one of the favorites in the upcoming World Cup. Susanna almost switched it off; she had only slightly more interest in football than in suicide. But the longer she watched the piece, the more interesting it got. Here were some of the finest footballers in the world, footballers expected to give the mighty Germans a run for their money. Were they Aryans? Hardly. Oh, several of them obviously had some white blood. But Negro and American Indian ancestry predominated on the Brazilian team.
'Isn't that interesting?' Susanna murmured. The people at the Propaganda Ministry were working with a light hand. They weren't saying,Look at these Brazilian mongrels. They're really quite impressive, aren't they? Instead, the message was simply,This is what the team that will challenge Germany looks like. If watchers decided the
