She was slogging her way through reducing a page of fractions to lowest terms when Francesca came into her bedroom and said, "I'm stuck."
"With what?" Alicia was sick of fractions, and the one she was about to tackle-39/91-didn't look as if it would ever turn into anything reasonable. Whatever Francesca was working on had to be more interesting than arithmetic.
"I'm supposed to write a poem about Jews, and I can't think of anything that rhymes," Francesca said anxiously.
"How long does it have to be?" Alicia asked-the automatic first question when confronting schoolwork.
"Eight lines!" By the way Francesca said it, her teacher was expecting her to turn in both parts of Faust tomorrow morning.
"What have you done so far?" Alicia asked. Sometimes her sister got brain cramps and wanted her to do all the work instead of just helping. She didn't like that.
But Francesca had a beginning. "Jews are nasty. Jews are bad./They hurt Aryans and make them sad," she recited in the singsong way children have with rhymes.
"That's a start, all right," Alicia said encouragingly. "Only six lines to go."
"But I can't think of anything else!" Francesca wailed. "Besides, once I've said that, what else do I need to say?"
What would happen if I told you you were writing a poem about yourself?Alicia wondered. Trouble was, she had a pretty good notion of the answer.You'd have hysterics, that's what. She'd learned the word not long before, and fallen in love with it. It sounded much grander than pitching a fit.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to forget what she'd found out earlier in the year. If she imagined she still was the way she had been then, helping with assignments like this one came easier. She said, "Maybe you can say the same thing over again in a different way."
"Like how?" Francesca asked, interested but doubtful.
Alicia flogged her muse and came up with a line: "Jews were Germany's bad luck." She eyed her sister. "Now you find something that rhymes."
Francesca screwed up her face as she thought. Her sudden smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. "That's why we made them a dead duck!" she exclaimed.
It wasn't very good poetry; it rhymed, but the rhythm was off. Alicia started to say so, but then, for a wonder, held her tongue. For somebody in Francesca's grade, it would do. And criticizing it would only get Alicia more deeply involved in shaping the poem, which was the last thing she wanted. Pretending she wasn't something she was came hard enough around strangers. It was harder still with her sisters.
Francesca, inevitably, wanted more help. "Give me another line," she said.
"No," Alicia said. "Come on. You can do it yourself."
Her sister hauled out the heavy artillery: "I'll tell Mommy."
It didn't work. "Go ahead," Alicia answered. "You're supposed to do your own homework, and you know it."
"You're mean!" Francesca said.
"I've got my work to do, too," Alicia said. Compared to writing rude verses about Jews, even reducing
39/91 to lowest terms didn't look so bad. "You're so mean! You lie and cheat!" When Francesca got angry, she didn't care what she said. She just wanted to wound.
But she didn't, not here. "That's good," Alicia said. Her sister gaped at her. "That's good," she repeated. "That will do for another line, if you change 'you' into 'they.'"
"Oh." Francesca thought about it. The sun came out from behind the clouds once more. "You're right. It will." She thought a little more. "They are so mean. They lie and cheat./And take away the food we eat." She looked toward Alicia, who was suddenly a respected literary analyst again, for her reaction.
And Alicia nodded. She didn't think it was wonderful poetry, but she also didn't think Francesca's teacher was expecting wonderful poetry. The lesson was more about hating Jews than about writing poetry, wonderful or not. Alicia stared suspiciously at 39/91. To encourage Francesca-and to encourage her to go away-she said, "See? Just two lines left."
"Uh-huh." Francesca didn't go away, but she didn't nag Alicia any more, either. Now that she'd come up with more than two lines mostly on her own, she could make others. "We're glad they aren't here any longer./Without them, the Reich grows ever stronger." She beamed. "I'm done!"
"Write them all down before you forget them," Alicia advised.
Francesca hurried off to do just that. A couple of minutes later, she cried out in despair: "I forgot!"
Alicia remembered the deathless verses. She recited them for her sister-slowly, so Francesca could get them down on paper. Francesca even said thank you, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
Back to arithmetic. 39/91? Now, 3 went into 39 evenly, but did it go into 91? No-she could see that at a glance.They're trying to trick me, she thought.This is going to be one of those stupid fractions that doesn'treduce, that's already in lowest terms. Then, remembering that 3? 13 made 39, she idly tried dividing 13 into 91. To her surprise, she discovered she could. 3/7, she wrote on the answer sheet.
Francesca sounded like a stampeding elephant going downstairs (Roxane, who was smaller, somehow contrived to sound like an earthquake). "Listen, Mommy!" she said from down below.
"Listen to what?" the Gimpel girls' mother asked. "I'm fixing supper."
"Listen to this poem I wrote," Francesca said proudly. She didn't mention anything about help from her big sister. In most circumstances, that would have infuriated Alicia, more because of its inaccuracy than for any other reason. Here, she didn't much mind.
Her mother's voice floated up the stairs: "All right. Go ahead."
And Francesca did. Either she'd already memorized it or she had her paper along with her. "What do you think?" she asked when she was done.
If Francesca had written the poem all by herself and then read it to her, Alicia knew she would have been speechless, at least for a moment. Her mother didn't hesitate, even for a heartbeat. "That's very good, dear," she said, and sounded as if she meant it. "Are you playing a game with Alicia and Roxane, or is it for school?"
"For school," Francesca answered.
"Well, I'm sure you'll get a good grade. Now go on back upstairs and let me finish dealing with the tongue here. I want to be sure your father doesn't have to wait too long to eat before he gets home from work."
Francesca thundered up the stairs again. To Alicia's relief, she didn't stop to talk any more, but went straight into her room. That left Alicia alone to wonder about something more complicated than fractions.
She knew she was smarter than most grownups. They sometimes knew more things than she did, but that was only because they'd been around longer, which often struck her as most unfair. Up till now, she'd never had any trouble learning whatever she set out to learn.
But what her mother had just done was beyond her, and she knew it. How had Mommy managed to sound so natural with no warning at all? Alicia knew Jews had to if they wanted to survive. She'd already slipped more times than she could count, though. She hadn't got caught yet, but she knew she'd slipped. As far as she could tell, her mother and father never slipped, not like that.
She sighed. Up till now, she'd been sure adults ruled the roost for no better reason than that they were bigger than children and could shout louder. That had always struck her as most unfair. But now, after listening to her mother perform, she thought she might be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, there was something to this business of growing up after all.
No word in the Volkischer Beobachter. Day followed day, and the Party newspaper said not a thing about Heinz Buckliger's speech to the Bonzen in Nuremberg. The longer the silence lasted, the more puzzling it got for Heinrich Gimpel. No matter how much curiosity gnawed at him, though, he couldn't do anything about satisfying it.