'That is not what I was going to say.' The chairman sounded offended.
Susanna Weisswas offended. 'What were you going to say, then,Herr Doktor Professor? That Professor Lutze is junior to me? He is. That he has published less than half of what I have? He has. That what hehas published is superficial compared to my work? It is, as any specialist will tell you.' She smiled with poisonous sweetness. 'There. You see? We agree completely.'
Professor Oppenhoff tried to draw on the cigar again, but choked on the smoke. Susanna held the poisoned smile till his coughs subsided into wheezes. He wagged a shaky forefinger at her. 'You have not the attitude of a proper National Socialist woman,' he said severely.
'Do I have the attitude of a proper National Socialist scholar?' No matter how offended, no matter how angry Susanna was, she took care to throw back the Party's name as if she were returning a lob in a game of tennis. 'Don't you think that is how you ought to judge me?'
'You should be turning out babies, not articles,' Oppenhoff said.
That she remained unwed, that she had no children, was a private grief for Susanna. Her back stiffened. Her private griefs were none of Oppenhoff's damned business. 'If Professor Lutze's work is good enough to let him deserve to go to London for the Medieval English Association meeting, what part of mine disqualifies me from going, too?' She didn't say Lutze didn't deserve to go, no matter what she thought. That would have got her another enemy. Academic politics were nasty enough without trying to make them worse.
'The travel budget…' the chairman said portentously.
This time, Susanna's smile was pure carnivore. 'I've spoken with the accountants. We have plenty. In fact, they recommend that we spend more before the end of the fiscal year in June. If we have unexpended funds, people are liable to decide we don't need so much next year.'
Franz Oppenhoff went gray with horror. A budget cut was every department chairman's nightmare. He threw his hands in the air. Cigar ash fluttered down onto his desk like snow. 'Go to London,Fraulein Doktor Professor Weiss! Go! Uphold the reputation of the university!' Not quite inaudibly, he added, 'And get the devil out of my hair.'
Susanna pretended not to hear that. Having got what she wanted, she could afford to be gracious. 'Thank you very much, Professor Oppenhoff. I'll make my travel arrangements right away.' In fact, she'd already made them. If she hadn't been able to browbeat Oppenhoff into letting her go, she would have had to cancel. She could easily have afforded the plane ticket and hotel, but she couldn't have gone during the semester without leave from on high. Now she had it.
'Is there anything else?' Professor Oppenhoff inquired.
She was tempted to complain that her office was smaller and had a worse view than those of male professors less senior than she-she seldom did things by half. Here, though, she judged she'd pushed the chairman about as far as she could. 'Not today, thanks,' she said grandly, like a snooty shopper declining a salesgirl's assistance. Small, straight nose tilted high, she strode out of Oppenhoff's office.
Spring was in the air when she left the east wing of the university complex and walked out into the chestnut grove that lay between the wings. The chestnuts were still bare-branched, but the first leaf buds had begun to appear. Soon the trees would be gloriously green, with birds singing and nesting in them. For now, Susanna could see down to the garden and the bronze statues of the great scholars there: Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the university; his brother, Alexander; Helmholtz; Treitschke; Mommsen; and Hegel.
Towering above all the other statues was a colossal bronze of Werner Heisenberg. Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor, had commemorated the physicist at the first Fuhrer 's personal request. Susanna had seen photos of Heisenberg. He was tall, yes, but on the scrawny side, almost as much so as Heinrich Gimpel. Breker had turned him into one of his countless Aryan supermen: broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a narrow waist and thighs like a draft horse's. The usual heroic Breker nude struggled to burst forth from the suit in which the sculptor had reluctantly had to drape his subject.
Susanna sighed. If Heisenberg and the other German scientists hadn't been so quick to see the implications of atomic fission…She sighed again. The world would be different, but who could guess how? One of the things she'd seen was that different didn't necessarily mean better.
A swarthy young man who wore a neat black beard and had a turban wrapped around his head hurried past Susanna. 'Please to excuse me,' he said in musically accented German.
'Aber naturlich,'she replied with regal politeness. The beturbaned young man went up the stairs two at a time and into the east wing of the university building. The Department of Germanic Languages shared the wing with the German Institute for Foreigners, which since 1922 had been instructing those from abroad on the German language and German culture, and the more recent Institute for Racial Studies, which helped decide which foreigners deserved to survive and be instructed about the blessings of German culture.
The fellow who'd gone past Susanna in such a rush had to be from Persia or India, probably the latter. Despite their complexions, folk from those lands got credit for being Aryans, and so lived on as subjects-sometimes even privileged subjects-within the Germanic Empire.
Had the young man been born farther west, had he been an Arab rather than an Aryan…As far as the Institute for Racial Studies was concerned, anti-Semitism extended to Arabs as well as Jews. Some of the things the Reich had done, and had browbeaten the Italians into doing, in the Middle East were on a scale to rival the destruction of the Slavic Untermenschen in Eastern Europe.
We aren't the only ones,Susanna thought with a shudder.We remember better than most of the others, though. That is one thing we have always done: we remember. But so do the Nazis. Can we really hope to outlast them? Heinrich and Walther think so, or say they do, but do they believe it when a noise outside wakes them up in the middle of the night?
She didn't know how they kept from screaming when they heard a noise like that. She had no idea at all howshe kept from screaming when she heard a noise like that. Even fourth-generation Nazis who'd never had an ideologically impure thought in their lives started sweating at noises in the night.They might know their thoughts were unsullied, their bloodlines uncontaminated. Yes, they might know, but did the Security Police? You never could tell.
And if you really had something to hide…
So far, though, all the noises Susanna had heard in and around her block of flats were those of everyday life: neighbors trying to go in and out quietly or sometimes too drunk to bother, a tree branch scraping on her window, traffic swishing by outside, once in a great while the trashcan-rattle of an accident. No men in high-crowned caps and black trenchcoats pounding on the door and roaring,'Judin, heraus!'
Not yet. Never yet. But the fear never went away, either.
With another shiver, Susanna hurried down toward the garden, down toward the statues of the men who had advanced German scholarship. And if she tried not to look at Breker's bronze of Heisenberg, well, even the Security Police weren't going to notice that.
Heinrich Gimpel kissed Lise and went up the street to the bus stop. He got there five minutes before the bus did. As it stopped, the door hissed open in front of him. He fed his account card into the fare slot, then withdrew it and stuck it back in his wallet as he looked up the aisle for a seat. He found one. At the next stop, a plump blond woman sat down next to him. When Willi Dorsch got on a couple of stops later, he and Heinrich nodded to each other, but that was all.
Not sitting with Willi didn't break Heinrich's heart. His friend had been cooler than usual since the awkward end to their evening of bridge.Does he worry that I'm looking for an affair with Erika? Heinrich shook his head as Willi sank into a seat near the back of the bus. He enjoyed looking at Erika Dorsch, but that wasn't the same thing at all. Even Lise, who wasn't inclined to be objective about such things, understood the difference.
But then a new, troubling thought crossed Heinrich's mind.Or does Willi think Erika's looking for an affair with me? Even if Willi didn't think Heinrich wanted the affair, he might not be so happy about seeing him every morning. And Heinrich hadn't the faintest idea what he could do about that.
The bus made its last few stops and pulled into the train station. Everyone got off. Almost everyone went to the platform for the Berlin-bound commuter train. As people queued up, Heinrich and Willi weren't particularly close. Heinrich sighed. More often than not, the two of them had chatted and gossiped like a couple of Hausfrau s all the way in to the city. It hadn't happened the past few days, and it didn't look as if it would today, either.
It didn't. When the train came into the the Stahnsdorf station, Willi sat down on the aisle next to a taken window seat. The seat on the other side of the aisle was taken, too. Whatever Willi Dorsch wanted, Heinrich's
