'This being so,' he went on, 'I am calling new elections to the Reichstag, voting to take place on Sunday, July 10. All seats are to be contested. Candidates need not be members of the Party, so long as they are of Aryan blood and good character. Ballots will be secret. There will be no penalty for voting one's conscience. I have not the slightest particle of doubt that the best will prevail. And the Volk and the Reich will be better for it.'
The ovation this time was hesitant, as if the Fuhrer 's audience was not sure whether it was allowed to cheer. That didn't surprise Susanna. What Heinz Buckliger had said did. But it was hardly surprising to be surprised in Berlin these days. That speech of Rolf Stolle's in the Adolf Hitler Platz where the crowd drove off the SS band… The SS had gone away, and not only did no one get arrested, the story made the evening news. Heinrich had been there. Up till today, Susanna had been sick with envy. Now she too had a moment of history to claim as her own.
'We National Socialists have ruled Germany wisely and well for many years,' Buckliger said. 'I have faith that the Volk will recognize our service and give us the large majority in the Reichstag we deserve.'
Loud, confident applause rang out. Of course people knew they were safe clapping after the Fuhrer praised the Nazis. Susanna thought Buckliger was probably right about the Party's winning most of the seats in the Reichstag. Even now, how many non-Nazis would be bold enough to run against Party Bonzen? How many who did run would win? Maybe some. Many? It seemed unlikely.
Did Buckliger really believe the Nazis had ruled Germany well and wisely? They'd won, thanks in no small measure to Hitler's demonic energy and Himmler's grim ruthlessness. But the blood of the people they'd murdered- the blood of the peoples they'd murdered-still cried out from the grave…and from the crematorium for those millions who'd never got a grave.
'I know reform, revitalization, cannot come overnight,' the Fuhrer said. 'The Reich is large and complex.
Those who call for everything to be perfect by tomorrow are naive. But those who say nothing needs repair are willfully blind. Change is part of life. It is here. It will go forward. And it will succeed.'
He got another big hand. Susanna was intrigued by his methods. In back-to-back sentences, he'd skewered Rolf Stolle and Lothar Prutzmann. No doubt he meant to show himself as a moderate, as a man embarked on the only possible course. That could work. But she remembered the thought she'd had not so long before. A moderate was also somebody vulnerable from both the left and the right. Did Heinz Buckliger see that?
Most people would say,What do you think you're doing, trying to guess along with the Fuhrer?Susanna cared very little about what most people said. If she had, she would have dropped her Judaism like a grenade with the fuse lit.
Besides, up till the time when Buckliger became Fuhrer, politics in the Reich had been not only appalling but, worse yet, bloody dull. Some of the things that went on were still appalling. But only someone who was deaf and blind would have called them dull. And when things were interesting, how could younot try to guess what would happen next?
Outside, the applause went on and on, though the Fuhrer didn't say anything more. Susanna concluded he was leaving the platform, leaving the university. Pretty soon, the coast would be clear. She could look out her window again without worrying about trigger-happy SS sharpshooters.
In the meantime…In the meantime, she still had her essays to grade. They would have been there even if Kurt Haldweim were still Fuhrer. In a lot of ways, life went on in spite of politics.
And, in a lot of ways, it didn't. How many lives had the politics of the Reich snuffed out? Too many. Millions and millions too many. What did undergraduate essays matter, with that in the back of her mind?
But her life had to go on, no matter what the Reich had done. Shaking her head, she picked up a red pen and got back to work.
A day like any other day. That was how Heinrich Gimpel remembered it afterwards. It could have been any Tuesday. The kids were running around getting ready for school. Francesca was still grumbling about some new idiotic project Frau Koch had inflicted on the class. Roxane was spelling words out loud; she was going to have a test. And Alicia had her nose in a book. Lise had to yell at her to get her to put it down and do the things she needed to do. Yes, everything seemed normal as could be.
Blackbirds on lawns tugged at worms as Heinrich walked up the street toward the bus stop. The sun shone brightly. Spring was really here now. He couldn't recall any other spring that had seemed so hopeful, so cheerful. Was that Mother Nature's fault or Heinz Buckliger's? Heinrich didn't know. He didn't much care, either. He would enjoy the moment for as long as it lasted.
He waited at the bus stop for a few minutes, then got on the bus for the Stahnsdorf train station. Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He sat down next to Heinrich.'Guten Morgen,' he said.
'Same to you,' Heinrich answered.'Wie geht's?'
'It's been better,' Willi said. 'I have to tell you, though, it's been worse, too. Erika's been…kind of cheerful lately.' He looked this way and that, a comic show of suspicion. 'I wonder what she's up to.'
'Heh,' Heinrich said uneasily. As far as he could tell, Erika had never said anything to Willi about what had happened at her sister's house on Burggrafen-Strasse-or about any of the several things that might have happened there but hadn't. He supposed he should have been grateful. Hewas grateful. But he was also suspicious, and his suspicion had no comic edge to it.
When the bus got to the Stahnsdorf station, he and Willi bought their copies of the Volkischer Beobachter and carried them out to the platform. They climbed aboard the train up to Berlin, sat down together, and started reading the morning news. Almost as if they'd rehearsed it, they simultaneously pointed to the same story below the fold on the front page.
STOLLE ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY, the headline said. There was a small head shot of the Gauleiter of Berlin just below the line of big black type. The story, as bald as any Heinrich had ever seen in the Beobachter, announced that Rolf Stolle was indeed running for the Reichstag.
'Can he do that?' Heinrich said, and then, 'How can he do that? He's already Gauleiter.' The puzzle offended his sense of order.
But Willi had the answer: 'Gauleiter's a Party office.Reichstag member would be a state office. He could hold both at once.'
'You're right,' Heinrich said wonderingly. The National Socialist Party and the Reich were as closely intertwined as a pair of lovers-or as a tree and a strangler fig. But they weren't quite one and the same.
'I wonder how the Fuhrer will like that,' Willi said.
'Stolle trying for a national forum?'
Willi nodded. 'Ja. And Stolle trying for votes in general.' He lowered his voice. 'I mean, who ever voted for Buckliger for anything? Party Bonzen and Wehrmacht bigwigs, sure, but nobody else.'
'You're right.' Again, wonder filled Heinrich's voice. Till Buckliger's speech at Friedrich Wilhelm University, that wouldn't have mattered. Who'd voted-really voted-for anyone who mattered in the Reich? No one. Elections had been afterthoughts, farces. This one felt different. Stolle must have sensed it, too. He might well have been a clown. Several of the moves he'd made lately convinced Heinrich he was anything but a fool.
And Willi, when it came to politics if not to women, was also anything but a fool. 'I wonderwhy the Fuhrer 's not running for a seat in the Reichstag, ' he said thoughtfully.
That was an interesting question, too. Heinrich said, 'Maybe he's worried he'd lose.'
'Maybe,' Willi said. 'It's the only thing I thought of that made any sense at all, too. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you know what I mean. He can find a district full of Prussian cabbage farmers or Bavarian beer brewers that would elect him no matter what.'
'You'd think so, wouldn't you?' Heinrich agreed. The more they talked about it, the more normal their tone became. The more freedom all the people of the Reich got, the more they seemed to take it for granted. The more they got, the more they craved? Was that true, too? Could that be true? Maybe it could. Maybe it really could. But who would have believed it a year before?
Willi suddenly looked sly. 'The other side of the coin is what happens if Buckliger doesn't run for the Reichstag. If he doesn't, he's still Fuhrer. He's still got all the Fuhrer 's powers. He can tell it what to do.'
'That's the way things work, all right,' Heinrich said. But then he did a little more thinking of his own. 'That's the way things worknow, all right. If the Volk chooses the Reichstag, though, will it be so easy to ignore? What's the point to having a real election if right afterwards you go and pretend you never did?'
'You're right there,' Willi admitted. 'I don't see the point to that, either. Maybe Buckliger does.'
'Who knows?' Heinrich said. 'Who knows for sure about anything that's going on these days? We'll just have
