Lise followed, but she said, 'You should have called. Alicia could have come over some other time.'
'Don't worry about it,' Esther answered. 'Gottlieb won't even notice she's here.' Another smile from both of them. Some of the thoughts that had occurred to Esther had surely occurred to Lise, too. The Gimpels had three girls to marry off. They would have started thinking about possibilities a long time ago.
'My goodness, Gottlieb,' Lise Gimpel said. 'You're looking very…fit.'
'I sort of have to be,' he answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. 'If you can't do what they throw at you, they make your life so nasty, you get into shape just so they'll leave you alone.'
'What are they telling you now that we've got a new Fuhrer? ' Lise asked him.
He didn't shrug now. He leaned forward; this interested him. 'When I first started, it was the same old stuff I'd always got in school,' he said. 'But it's changed since then.'
'Well, what are they saying these days?'
'A lot more about what good exercise it is and how we'll make friends we'll keep for the rest of our lives,' Gottlieb said. 'A lot less about how it's getting us ready to be soldiers who'll go out and slaughter the Reich 's enemies. A lot less about our shovels, too.'
Esther frowned. 'Your shovels?'
Her son nodded. 'In the Wehrmacht, it's your rifle. That's what people say, anyhow. In the Hitler Jugend, it's our shovels. We have to carry them with us everywhere. We have to keep them polished-the blade and the handle. If you let your shovel get rusty or you lose it, I don't know what they do to you. Something horrible-I know that. Nobody wants to find out what.'
'Shovels,' Esther repeated. It made sense, of a sort. The Hitler Youth was a dress rehearsal for the Army. Someone who knew how to take care of a shovel and had the discipline to do it-even if the act itself was fundamentally meaningless-would quickly learn how to take care of a rifle and gain the discipline to do it. And that would not be meaningless at all.
'The drillmasters don't yell at us as much as they used to, either,' Gottlieb said. 'Of course, we've been in for a while now, too. We know what we need to do. They don't have to yell at us all the time any more.'
'What do you do for fun?' Esther asked.
'Polish our shovels,' Gottlieb answered, deadpan. Esther made a face at him. He grinned. He'd got her, and he knew it. He went on, 'A lot of the time, we just sleep when we get the chance. They do run us pretty ragged.'
'You can't sleep all the time,' Esther said, even if that was a risky assumption to make about teenagers.
But Gottlieb didn't deny it. He said, 'We read. We listen to the radio-there's no televisor in the barracks. We play cards. We're not supposed to do it for money, but I'm about fifteen Reichsmarks ahead so far.' He looked smug. Then he added, 'And there's a Bund deutscher Madel camp about half a kilometer from ours. Some of the guys sneak over there after lights-out.'
There it was, the thing Esther feared. Lots of Bd M camps were near those of the Hitler Jugend. Surprising numbers-or maybe numbers not so surprising-of Bd M girls found themselves pregnant every year, too. 'What about you?' she asked, her tone as light as she could make it. If some gentile girl won his heart, or a related piece of his anatomy…
'I haven't. I don't think I will,' he said after due consideration very much like Walther's. 'You get into real trouble if they catch you doing that-worse than losing your shovel. And besides, it's like I told Aunt Susanna the night Alicia found out what she is: it just wouldn't be a good idea for me.'
Lise Gimpel smiled. Esther kissed him. She got lipstick on his cheek, but he didn't notice and she didn't care. She wanted to say something like,You're a very good boy, and I'm prouder than I know how to tell you. The only thing holding her back was the knowledge that the usual seventeen-year-old male, hearing something of that sort, would go disgrace himself just to take the jinx off.
On the other hand, Gottlieb was not your average seventeen-year-old male. Esther did say it. And Gottlieb proved his sterling qualities: he grinned.
Along with the New Orleans Vicki, which currently held pride of place, Anna's bedroom was full of hedgehogs: stuffed cuddly ones, smaller ones made of painted ceramics or bronze, a hedgehog lamp with the switch in his little black nose, even hedgehogs printed on her sheets. Alicia thought it was all a little too much, but she never would have said so. Besides, today she had something else on her mind.
'You're so lucky!' she burst out as soon as they were alone together. 'Solucky!'
'How come?' Anna asked. 'I'm just me, same as I always was.' She never took herself too seriously.
But Alicia had an answer for her: 'I'll tell you why-because everybody here knows what you are. You don't have to keep any secrets.'
Her friend nodded, but then started to laugh. 'Don't tell that to Gottlieb, that's all I've got to say. He knew for five years before they could tell me, and it was driving him crazy. Crazier.'
'Oh.' Alicia hadn't thought of that. 'Well, everybody knows now, anyway. Some of the things Francesca and Roxane say make me want to smack 'em, and I can't, because they'd wonder why.'
'Just pay no attention to them,' Anna told her-easier said than done. She went on, 'Gottlieb didn't pay attention to me when I said stupid stuff like that for all those years. Of course, he doesn't pay much attention to me now that I know better, either. I'm just a kid, he says.' Her snort was intended to convey how little older brothers knew.
Alicia didn't know anything about older brothers-or younger brothers, for that matter. She wasn't much interested in learning more, either. The boys in her class were the worst sort of vermin: a poor recommendation for the male half of the species. When she said, 'Gottlieb's notso bad,' she was offering Anna an enormous concession. She'd known him all her life, after all.
But so had Anna, and at much closer quarters. If no man is a hero to his valet, no boy is to his little sister. 'It's-peaceful now that he's off at the Hitler Jugend camp most of the time,' Anna said.
'Peaceful,' Alicia echoed. With Gottlieb gone, Anna had her parents all to herself. Alicia tried to imagine what that would be like. She couldn't. She hadn't even been two when Francesca was born. She didn't remember what being an only child was like, and she'd never know now. When she got bigger, she was the one who'd leave for a Bd M camp. Her little sisters would get more attention from Mommy and Daddy, which hardly seemed fair.
'Here, let's do this,' Anna said. The game that followed ended up involving the Vicki, several of the stuffed hedgehogs-including a big one who was bright red and had a devil's horns and pitchfork-an imaginary and magical snowstorm, and the willow tree that grew just outside Anna's window. In the summertime, when it had all its leaves, the willow was full of peeping finches and warblers; woodpeckers scuttled along the bigger branches and drummed as they drilled their way after caterpillars. Now the branches and twigs were bare. Still, a house sparrow perched on one and peered into the bedroom with beady black eyes.
'Look!' Alicia pointed at the sparrow. 'It's an SS bird.' It got incorporated into the game, which had been short of villains up till then.
They groaned when Anna's mother called them down to supper.Frau Stutzman put Alicia between Anna and Gottlieb at the table, the same way a nuclear engineer would put cadmium between two uranium bricks. 'So,' Gottlieb said, his voice very much a man's, 'how do you like being one of us?'
That was a question Alicia couldn't have heard at the supper table at her house. 'It's all right. I've kind of got used to it,' she said. But then she decided something more was called for, and she added, 'It is what I am, after all. I ought to know about it.'
Gottlieb gave her a suddenly thoughtful look. 'I said something like that, too. I took longer than you have to figure it out, though.'
Alicia needed a little while to realize that was a compliment of sorts. Anna's surprised expression did more to help her figure it out than Gottlieb's words themselves. She had no idea what to do with praise from a seventeen- year-old boy, and so she didn't do anything but go on with supper. It was beef tongue with potatoes and carrots and onions, which she liked.Frau Stutzman spiced the tongue differently from the way her mother did, but it was still good.
Over dessert,Herr Stutzman started telling Gottlieb about something he called a software trap. He hadn't gone very far before he stopped speaking German, or at least any sort of German Alicia understood. Gottlieb followed well enough, and gave back some of the same gibberish. 'You got through, though?' he said at last.
'Through the second portal, like I told you. That's how I got the backside look at the trap,' his father answered.
