Nobody on the bus going home told the children to be quiet. They giggled and squealed and sang songs, most of them about the things a Beast did in the woods. They would have danced in the aisle, but that was too much for the long-suffering bus driver. "You got to stay in your seats," he shouted over the din in the bus. "You got to. Them's the rules, by God."
The children did sit down. Maybe that was simply fear about what would happen to them if they didn't, but maybe it was something more, too. In the Reich, few arguments carried more weight thanthem's the rules. The rules and good order went hand in hand, and German children learned to obey along with their other lessons.
But we wouldn't obey Lothar Prutzmann, even if the Beast thought we ought to,Alicia thought. Then something else crossed her mind-what do you mean, we?She couldn't automatically think of herself as a German any more. That was what being a Jew did to her: it made her an outsider in her own country.
Part of her still wished for the feeling of belonging she'd had before she found out what she was. But, considering a lot of the things Germans had done, maybe being on the outside looking in was the better part of the bargain.
Had Lise Gimpel expected miracles from the new Reichstag, she would have been disappointed. Since she expected very little, she found herself pleasantly surprised every now and again. The delegates chose Rolf Stolle as their Speaker. The Gauleiter used his new bully pulpit to go right on slanging Heinz Buckliger for not doing enough, and for not doing it fast enough. That didn't surprise Lise at all.
Laws cutting back the powers of the SS did. So did the public hangings of a couple of Lothar Prutzmann's chief henchmen. The dangling bodies-shown on the evening news-declared the new laws had teeth. The lesson was unsubtle and thoroughly Nazi, but no less effective for that.
Holland held elections, too, and chose a parliament with a non-Fascist majority. Panzers didn't roll. The German Foreign Ministry said not a word. Dutchmen didn't dance in the streets. They didn't seem to want to give the Reich any excuse to change its mind. Lise couldn't blame them.
As summer gave way to fall, Heinrich said the Americans were getting friskier than ever. "What will they do?" Lise asked him. "Will they try to rebel?"
"I don't think so. I hope not," her husband answered. "That would be just what…some people needed." He still spoke carefully. The house might be bugged.
"How hard would the government…the way it is now…try to stop them?"
"I don't know that, either," Heinrich said. "But if the government…the way it is now…didn't try to stop them, I don't think it would be the government for very long."
"But they really have put a boot on the SS's neck," Lise protested.
"I wasn't talking about the SS. I was talking about the Wehrmacht, " Heinrich said. "The Army won't put up with weakness here, and it won't want to let the Yankees get too strong. They aren't like the Dutch or the Czechs. They could be rivals. They could be worse rivals than the Empire of Japan, because they're more like us. The Wehrmacht wouldn't like that at all, and how can you blame it?"
Lise eyed her husband before answering. He'd tacked on the last half dozen words, she judged, to keep anyone on the other end of a bug happy. "Who possibly could?" she said in the same spirit. "After it broke up the Putsch, who could blame it for anything?"
Heinrich started to nod, then caught himself and wagged a finger at her, as if to say,Naughty, naughty. Lise stuck out her tongue. Maybe she'd meant you couldn't blame the Wehrmacht for anything because it hadn't done anything blameworthy. Or maybe she'd meant you didn't dare blame it for anything, because it was the greatest power in the land. Which? Her green eyes dancing, she shook her head. She was a woman. She was entitled to her mysteries. And she wasn't altogether sure herself.
"What about the Czechs?" she asked, changing the subject a little. "Will the Reich let them go?"
Her husband shrugged. "Beats me. They have the vote last summer to back up their declaration of independence. And if anybody can outfinagle the Foreign Ministry, it's the fellow they've got leading Unity. He can make you feel ashamed when you do something that isn't on the up-and-up, and how many people are able to do that? But…"
"Yes. But." Lise knew why Heinrich hesitated. The Czechs were Slavs, and Slavs, even Slavs like the Czechs who'd been entangled in German affairs since time out of mind, were in the National Socialist way of thinking Untermenschen. If you once started making concessions to Untermenschen, didn't you acknowledge they might not be so inferior after all? And if you acknowledged that, how did you justify the massacres and the slave labor that had filled the last seventy years?
Even more to the point, if you acknowledged that Slavs-or some Slavs-might not be Untermenschen, didn't you take a step towards acknowledging that Jews also might not be Untermenschen?Could a National Socialist government take a step in that direction?
"the Fuhrer has said mistakes were made in years gone by," Heinrich said; if the Fuhrer said it, it couldn't possibly be treasonous-as long as he stayed Fuhrer. "If we decide to set some of those mistakes to rights, that wouldn't be so bad."
"No. Of course it wouldn't," Lise answered. Even though the Czechs were doing most of the agitating these days, they'd got off relatively easy. How could the Reich make amends to the relative handful of Poles and Russians and Ukrainians who still survived?
And, for that matter, how could the Reich make amends to the handful of Jews who, in spite of everything, still survived? Lise knew an impossibility when she saw one. Come to that, she didn't want a parade of blackshirts and Party Bonzen clicking their heels and apologizing to her. That sort of spectacle might appeal to Susanna, but then Susanna reveled in opera. All Lise wanted was to be left alone, to get on with her life regardless of what she happened to be.
"We're asking questions we couldn't even have imagined a couple of years ago," Heinrich said. "Next to the questions, the answers don't seem quite so important."
"Says who?" Lise inquired sarcastically. "If the Security Police had come up with a different answer to their question a few months ago, you wouldn't be here trying to come up with answers to yours."And the girls wouldn't be here, either, she thought,and it wouldn't matter whether I was here or not because I'd be dead inside.
After a brief pause, her husband nodded. "Well, you're right," he said. One of the reasons they'd stayed pretty happily married the past fifteen years was that they were both able to say that when they needed to.
"Politics!" Lise turned the word into a curse. "I wish politics never had anything to do with us. I wish we could just go on about our business."
"Part of our business is making the Reich better. That's part of everybody's business right now, I think," Heinrich said. "If we don't make it better, what'll happen? We saw before the election-other people will make it worse, that's what."
Lise wanted to quarrel with him. But she remembered too well the horror that had coursed through her when Lothar Prutzmann's tame announcer started going on about the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. And, remembering, she too said those three little words almost as important as I love you: "Well, you're right."
Heinrich, Lise, and the girls closed their umbrellas when they came up onto the Stutzmans' front porch. The walk from the bus stop had been wet, but not too wet. Winter was thinking about making way for spring. It hadn't got around to doing it yet; still, the worst of the nasty weather was probably past. Heinrich dared hope so, anyway.
All three Gimpel girls raced for the doorbell. Francesca rang it a split second before Alicia or Roxane could. Heinrich and Lise smiled over the girls' heads. They would do that at elevators, too, which made their parents require that they take turns pressing those buttons.Anyone would think they're children or something, went through Heinrich's mind. He smiled again.