As he ate, he listened to the lunchroom chatter. Now it was officiaclass="underline" the Americans would fall short on this year's assessment. Plenty of people at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht wondered what the Reich would do about it. Heinrich wondered himself. Someone a couple of tables over said, "The Yankees are lucky bastards. If we had a Fuhrer in place, he'd have made them knuckle under, you bet."
Willi Dorsch heard that, too. "He's right," he said, and got up to pour himself some more coffee. Heinrich nodded, though he couldn't help thinking that getting devastated by nuclear weapons and then spending the next forty years under German occupation wasn't precisely the kind of luck he most wanted to have.
On the other hand, most of the Americans remained alive. Aside from the war casualties, the conquerors had worked their usual horrors on Jews and Negroes. Even so, the population of the USA was only about a third lower than it had been before the war. Maybe the Americans as a wholewere lucky-if you compared them to such Untermenschen.
At another table not far from the one where Heinrich and Willi were sitting, a colonel growled, "To hell with the first edition! This is all a bunch of claptrap, if anybody wants to know the truth."
Heinrich took a bite of tongue sausage. Who would presume to argue with such an august personage? Willi looked smug as he came back with his refill. He must have heard the officer, too. He wagged a finger at Heinrich, as if to say,You see?
But two colonels sat at that table. The second one, a younger man, shook his head and said, "I'm not so sure, Dietrich. I've been a good Party man for more than twenty years now. If there's a way to stay in the rules and let me help choose the new Fuhrer, I'm for it."
"That's the leadership's job," the first colonel-Dietrich-said.
"Well, yes," the other colonel answered. "But how do leaders get to be leaders? If the people under them don't want to follow, what have you got? A mess, that's what. Look at France in 1940."
Dietrich snorted. "Oh, go on, Paul. If the Reich ever comes to that, we can all stick our heads in the showers, because we'll be done for anyway."
"I didn't say it would be that bad-we're not Frenchmen, after all," Paul replied. "But the principle is the same."
Another snort from the first colonel. "Principle? What's principle? Something losers talk about to explain why they've lost."
"Oh, really? Are you saying the Party has no principles?" Paul's voice was silky with danger.
But Dietrich wouldn't fall into that trap. "I'm saying victory is the first principle, and none of the others matters much." He had a fat cigar smoking in an ashtray. Now he picked it up and thrust it at his friend. "If I'm wrong, how come we shout,'Sieg heil!'? Explain that to me."
A captain who'd been siting at another table came over and said, "Excuse me, sir, but how does following the Party's original rules make victory any less likely?" He would never have had the nerve to do anything like that if Paul hadn't spoken up in favor of the first edition, not when Dietrich outranked him by three grades. As things were, he had a protector.
The table with the two colonels quickly became the day's focal point for that particular argument. Wehrmacht officers and civilian experts gathered around it. Things got more heated by the moment. Willi's face lit up. "Shall we join them?" he asked.
"Go ahead, if you want to," Heinrich answered. "But what we say won't matter a pfennig's worth either way."And that's been true everywhere in the Reichever since Hitler took over. One more good line he added to the long, long list of things he couldn't say no matter how true they were.
Sometimes a pounding on the door didn't make Lise Gimpel panic. When it came just after half past three, it made her smile. It meant the children were home from school. She hurried to the door and opened it. "Hello, girls," she said. "What did you learn today?"
"Klaus Frick eats bugs," Francesca announced.
Alicia and Roxane both made disgusted noises, but not big disgusted noises. From this, Lise concluded her middle daughter was going on with things she'd said on the school bus. The other two girls must have had the chance to start getting used to that lovely piece of news. "How do you know he eats bugs?" Lise asked, remembering how schoolyard rumors could claim anybody did anything.
But Francesca answered, "Because I saw him do it. He caught one and put it in his mouth, and it went crunch."
"And he's in your class, isn't he?" Lise said unhappily. Francesca nodded. Lise shuddered. "That's…pretty bad." Eight-year-old boys frequently were disgusting creatures, but this Klaus Frick went overboard.
Roxane giggled. "Tell her the rest!"
"The rest? There's more?" Lise said. "Do I want to know?"
"No," Alicia said quickly.
From that, Lise got a hint about whatmore might be. But Roxane was still snickering, and Francesca was laughing, too. At their age, what was disgusting was also funny. The potty jokes that had made the rounds when Lise was in the lower grades still circulated. Alicia also laughed at a lot of them; ten wasn't too old. Not today, though. Francesca said, "Klaus said-he said he was eating just like a Jew. He said Jews ate bugs all the time."
Hearing it again sent Roxane into gales of laughter. Francesca thought it was pretty funny, too. Alicia gave her verdict in one word: "Revolting."
"He's probably right, though. Jewswere revolting," Francesca said. "Everybody knows that." Her little sister nodded. Alicia started to say something, then very obviously didn't.
Lise Gimpel spoke up before her oldest daughter could slip: "Jews may have been revolting, but how does Klaus Frick know what they ate? How could he? Nobody your age has ever seen one-and I'm sure they don't teach you about bugs in school. I'm with Alicia here: Jews may have been revolting, but your classmate certainly is."
Alicia stuck out her tongue at Francesca. That was a good, healthy, normal reaction. But Roxane, always an agitator, pointed and exclaimed, "Eww! It's got a bug's leg on it!"
"Enough!" Lise said. "All three of you, go in the kitchen right now and have your snacks." She held up a warning hand. "I'm not done. The first one who says anything-anything-about bugs or Jews or anything else disgusting while you're eating is in big trouble.Big trouble, you hear me?"
They all nodded. The two younger ones hurried to the kitchen. Alicia hung back for a moment. "Jews or anythingelse disgusting?" she asked softly.
"That's how you've got to say it," Lise whispered back, biting her lip. "You have to wear a mask, remember?" Alicia nodded, though the mask had slipped. Lise gave her a little push. "Go on. Eat your snack. This was just foolishness. Don't let it worry you." Nodding again, and looking a tiny bit happier, Alicia went.
Lise Gimpel's sigh sounded amazingly like Heinrich's. You needed to have a hide like an elephant's to hope to survive. Children didn't naturally come equipped with that kind of hide. They had to acquire it, one painful scar after another. Lise remembered how many tears she'd shed when she was younger.
Jokes about Jews and gibes about Jews went on and on. Lise couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anything aboutlive Jews before those few luckless families were found in the Serbian hinterlands.
Everyone needed someone to hate. Americans hadn't hated Jews the way Europeans had, but they'd had Negroes to hate instead. Now there were hardly any Jews or Negroes in the USA. Did people on the other side of the Atlantic still tell jokes about the Negroes who weren't there any more? Lise wouldn't have been surprised. People were like that, however much you wished they weren't.
Back in the ancient days, after David slew Goliath and the Hebrews triumphed in Palestine, had they told jokes about the Philistines? That wouldn't have surprised Lise, either. She didn't think Jews were the Herrenvolk, the master race, the way Germans thought about themselves. She just thought they were people like any others, with all the faults and foibles of any other folk. Was it too much to ask for other people to see them the same way?