Kathe went off in one direction, with Claudia and Adolf in tow. Heinrich made his own way down the street. Maybe he was shopping for Ilse. Had Drucker been his son’s age, he would have gone shopping for her; he was sure of that.
As things were, he went shopping for his wife. He found an excellent buy on Limoges porcelain at a shop not far from the town council hall. The shop stocked a wide variety of goods imported from France, all at very reasonable prices. He remarked on that as he made his purchase. “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, nodding. “In Paris itself, you could not buy these things so cheap.”
“I believe it,” Drucker said. Why that might be so never entered his mind. He took it for granted that Germany was entitled to first claim on whatever France produced. Germany, after all, was the beating heart of the Reich.
“Would you like me to do that up in gift-wrapping, sir?” the clerk asked.
“Yes, please.” Drucker hated wrapping presents himself. “Thank you very much. And put it in a plain bag afterwards, if you’d be so kind.” He left the shop well pleased with himself. The plate, which reproduced an eighteenth-century painting of a shaded grotto, would look splendid on the mantel, or perhaps mounted on the wall.
He didn’t bother heading back toward the Volkswagen, not yet. He knew he shopped more efficiently than Kathe and the children. Instead, he window-shopped as he wandered through the streets of Greifswald. He paused thoughtfully in front of a shop that stocked goods imported not from France but from Italy. A slow smile stole across his face. He went inside and made a purchase. He had that one gift-wrapped, too. The clerk, a pretty young woman, was most obliging. By the way she smiled, she might have been obliging if he’d been interested in something other than the shop’s stock in trade. But he had no great interest in anyone but Kathe, and so did not experiment.
When he went back to the car, he found the rest of the family there ahead of him, and had to endure their teasing all the way home. “You’ll get coal for Christmas, every one of you,” he growled in mock anger, “brown coal that won’t even burn without stinking and smoking.”
On Christmas morning, before sunup, he took his family outside. They looked toward the east, not toward Bethlehem but toward Peenemunde, about thirty kilometers away. To his disappointment, the fog lay too thick to let them see the latest A-45 ascend to the heavens, but the roar of the rocket reverberated inside their bones.
“Maybe you’ll ride it one of these days, Heinrich, Adolf,” he said.
His sons’ faces glowed with pride. Claudia said, “And what about me?” The best he could do to answer her was change the subject.
They went inside and opened presents, which provided plenty of distraction. Kathe exclaimed in delight at the plate from Limoges. She’d got Drucker a fancy meerschaum, and some Turkish tobacco to smoke in it. He puffed away in delight. Heinrich got a fancy one-liter beer stein. He proceeded to fill and then empty it, after which he got sleepy and red in the face.
“Maybe we should have bought the half-liter stein after all,” Drucker said. Kathe laughed. Heinrich looked offended and woozy at the same time.
Adolf got a battery-powered Leopard panzer with a control on the end of a long wire. He blitzkrieged through the living room and around the Christmas tree, till he wrapped the wire around the tree and couldn’t undo things by reversing. Claudia squealed ecstatically when she opened her present, a blond plastic doll with a spectacular wardrobe and even more spectacular figure. That one hadn’t been cheap, since it was imported from the USA, but it made her so happy, Drucker judged it well worth the cost.
“All my friends will be jealous,” Claudia chortled, “especially Eva. She’s wanted one for weeks-practically forever.”
“Maybe she got one, too,” Drucker said. A little of Claudia’s joy evaporated; she hadn’t thought of that. But then, because it was Christmas, she brightened and made the best of it.
After a Christmas supper of fat roast goose, all her resentment went away, and, for the evening, all of Drucker’s, too. Heinrich went out to take Ilse to a party. Adolf kept destroying the Reich ’s enemies till bedtime, while Claudia played with the American doll.
Heinrich had a key. After the younger children went to sleep, there was nothing to keep Kathe and Drucker from climbing the stairs to their own bedroom. With the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Drucker took the second gift-wrapped package from under a spare pillow in the closet and handed it to her. She let out a small shriek of happy surprise. “Why didn’t you give this to me with everything else?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” he answered, and closed the bedroom door as she opened the package. She let out another small shriek: it held a pair of frilly garters and other bits of lace and near-transparency. He grinned. “Gift-wrapping for you.”
She looked at him sidelong. “And then, I suppose, you’ll expect to unwrap me.”
Before very long, he did just that. Some little while after she was unwrapped, they lay side by side, naked and happy. He toyed idly with her nipple. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
“I hope it was,” she told him, her voice arch.
“Jawohl!” he answered, as he might have to his commanding general. He wished he could have raised a different sort of salute, but that took longer in middle age.
She lay quiet for so long, he wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then she said “Hans?” in tones altogether different from the ones she had been using. He made a wordless noise to show he was listening. She leaned over and whispered in his ear: “My father’s mother… I think she really was a Jew.”
He didn’t say anything right away. Whatever he said, he knew, would touch, would shape, the rest of their lives together. Silence, on the other hand, would only alarm her. He whispered back: “As long as the Gestapo doesn’t think so, who cares?” She hugged him, then burst into tears, and then, very quickly, did go to sleep. After a couple of hours, so did he.
10
“I do not understand,” Felless said. She had said that many, many times since coming to the Greater German Reich. Most of the time, as now, she did not mean she could not understand the translator who was rendering some official’s words into the language of the Race. For a Big Ugly, this translator spoke the language well enough. What he said, though, and what the official said, made no sense to her.
“I will repeat myself,” the security official said. He seemed patient enough, willing enough, to make himself clear. Because he had lost most of the hair on top of his head, he looked a little less alien to her than did a lot of Tosevites. Below a wide forehead, his face was narrow, with a pointed chin. He spoke in the guttural Deutsch language. The translator turned his words into those Felless could follow: “The Jews deserve extermination because they are an inferior race.”
“Yes, you have said that before, Gruppenfuhrer Eichmann,” Felless said. “But saying something and demonstrating it is true are not the same. Is it not so that the Jews have given the Tosevite notempire known as the United States many able scientists? Is it not true that the Jews under the rule of the Race are thriving in Poland and Palestine and… and elsewhere?” She had learned some Tosevite geography, but not much.
“These things are true, Senior Researcher, yes,” Eichmann said calmly. “In fact, they prove my point.”
Felless’ jaw muscles tensed. She wanted to bite him. The urge was atavistic, and she knew it. But maybe pain would make him come out with something she recognized as sense. “How does it prove your point?” she demanded. “Does it not seem to prove exactly the opposite?”