She ducked into the bathroom as her sisters came out of the bedroom they shared. They would camp in the hall waiting for her, so she hurried. When she opened the door again, she pushed past them and back into her room to get dressed. That meant she didn't have to say anything much to them for a little while longer.
Like any ten-year-old girl, she put on the tan blouse and skirt that were the uniform of the Bund deutscher Madel. She remembered how proud she'd been when she turned ten the summer before and could join the League of German Maidens like Anna and her other older friends. Putting on the uniform, with its swastika armband, was a sign she was growing up.
As she pulled up her white socks and tied her stout brown shoes, though, the uniform suddenly seemed a lie, a betrayal.I'm not a German maiden, she thought unhappily.I'm a Jewish maiden. She shivered, though a steam radiator kept her room cozy and warm.
On her bookshelves stood a children's classic from the early days of the Reich, Julius Streicher's Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. Like millions of German youngsters across three generations, she'd learned the difference between Aryans and Jews from the slim little volume. The blond, handsome, muscular Aryan could work and fight. The pudgy, swarthy, hook-nosed, flashily dressed Jew was the greatest scoundrel in the Reich. Alicia had believed that with all her heart. It was in a book-in every book. How could it be wrong?
Aryan children with blond or light brown hair jeered as homely, black-haired Jewish children and a Jewish teacher were ousted from their school. A few pages later, an Aryan boy grinned and played a concertina while more ugly Jews with big noses and fleshy lips trudged into exile past a sign that said ONE-WAY STREET. The colorful pictures were so bright and cheerful, they commanded belief. Alicia had the companion volume,The Poison Mushroom, too.
She stared at the caricatures of the Jews. She didn't look like that, nor did her sisters and parents. The Stutzmans and Susanna Weiss didn't, either. Realizing that helped steady her. If Trust No Fox had one lie in it, maybe it had lots of lies in it. With all her heart, she hoped so.
"Alicia!" her mother called. "Hurry up! It's breakfast!"
"Coming!" she said, and put the book away.
"Slowpoke," said Roxane, who with Francesca was already digging in to sausages and eggs. She was the teaser in the family, always looking for ways to get under her older sisters' skins and usually finding one.
Francesca asked the question Alicia had been dreading: "Well, what did you do when you got to stay up late last night?"
Behind Alicia, her mother suddenly stopped bustling about the kitchen. She stood still and quiet, waiting to hear what her oldest daughter would say-and maybe to jump in and help if she had to. "It wasn't very exciting," Alicia answered, as casually as she could. "Just a lot of talk. Grownups." She rolled her eyes. If she exaggerated, it wouldn't hurt, not here. Francesca already knew what she thought of grownups.
Her sister accepted what she said. Her mother started moving again, as if she'd only just noticed she'd stopped. And Alicia…Alicia was sunk in misery. She couldn't ever remember lying to Francesca before.
The girls got their books and went to the bus stop on the corner. Older girls in tan uniforms like Alicia's, older boys in brown Hitler Youth togs, and younger children dressed every which way waited for the school bus. "Hello, Alicia," said Emma Handrick, who lived a few doors away. "Did you get the math homework?"
"Sure," Alicia said, surprised Emma needed to ask; she almost always got the homework.
"Can I copy it from you on the way to school?" Emma asked eagerly. "Please? My mother said she'd clobber me if I got another lousy grade."
She'd asked before. Alicia had always said no. Her father and mother had taught her only to do her own work. They said anything else was dishonest. She'd gone along with that; it fit the way she thought. But today everything seemed up in the air. If she said no, would the neighbor girl denounce her as a Jew?
Whatever else happened, that couldn't. Not just her safety rode on it. So did her sisters' and her parents'. She nodded and smiled. "All right."
Emma's rather doughy face lit up in surprised delight. Francesca and Roxane looked horrified. Roxane had an I'm-going-to-tell expression on her face. Most of the time, that would have worried Alicia. Now she had bigger things to worry about. She felt like Atlas (her class had done Greek mythology the year before), with the weight of the heavens on her shoulders.
The school bus stopped at the corner. The doors hissed open. The children got on. A couple of Alicia's friends waved to her. She waved back, but found a seat with Emma. Her sisters perched together on another pair of seats. Their backs were stiff with disapproval at first, but then they started talking with friends of their own and forgot Alicia's scandalous behavior-for the time being, anyhow.
"You're a lifesaver," Emma said, her pencil racing over the paper. She finished the last problem-they were multiplying fractions-as the bus pulled into the schoolyard. "I even think I see how to do them myself."
"That's good," Alicia said. She wasn't sure she believed it. She was pretty sure shedidn't believe it, in fact. Emma would never be one of the smartest people in the class, which was putting it mildly. But hearing it salved Alicia's conscience.
She put the homework back in her folder and got off the bus. Francesca and Roxane waved as they hurried to the lines in front of their classrooms. Maybe they'd forgiven her sin. Maybe. She took her own place in line-right in front of Emma, in alphabetical order.
At precisely eight o'clock, the classroom door opened. "Come in, children," the teacher boomed.
"Jawohl, Herr Kessler," Alicia and the rest of the class chorused. All over the schoolyard, other classes were greeting their teachers the same way. They all marched into the classrooms in perfect step-well, not quite so perfect in the younger grades.
Again with the others, Alicia set her books and papers on her desk and stood at attention behind her chair. She faced the swastika flag that hung by the door, but her eyes were on Herr Kessler. He stood so stiff, he might have turned to stone. (Alicia thought of Perseus and the Gorgon.)
Suddenly, the teacher's right arm shot up and out."Heil!" he barked.
Alicia and her classmates also honored the flag with the German salute."Heil!" they said. Till this morning, she'd been proud to salute the flag. Why not? Till this morning, she'd been an Aryan among Aryans, one who deserved that privilege. Now? Now everything seemed different. No one else knew what she was, but she did, and the knowledge ate at her. Hadn't Hitler himself called Jews parasites on the nation? Alicia felt like an enormous cockroach. For a wild, frightening moment, she wondered if anyone else could see her metamorphosis.
Evidently not.Herr Kessler got to work on grammar: which prepositions took the dative, which the accusative, and which both and with what changes of meaning. Alicia had no trouble with any of that. But some people did-Emma, for instance. Alicia knew the Handricks had the televisor on all the time; she'd heard her mother talk about it. Even so, if you listened to how educated people talked, if you paid any attention at all, how could you make mistakes? Emma did, and she wasn't the only one.Herr Kessler made notations in the roll book in red ink. Emma's mother was liable to clobber her in spite of the arithmetic homework she'd got from Alicia.
History and geography came next. The teacher pulled down a big map of the world that hung above the blackboard. The Germanic Empire, shown in the blood-red of the flag, stretched from England deep into Siberia and India. Paler red showed lands occupied but not formally annexed: France, the United States, Canada. In the Empire's shadow were the little realms of the allied nations: Sweden's gold, Finland's pale blue, the greens of Hungary and Portugal, Romania's dark blue, purple for Spain and Bulgaria, and the yellow of the Italian Empire around the Mediterranean. Africa was mostly red, too, though Portugal, Spain, and Italy kept their colonies on the dark continent and the Aryan-dominated Union of South Africa was another ally, not a conquest.