Sarah, now, Sarah had a different opinion. The downside to German bureaucracy was that everything had to be perfectly aligned before anything moved. If a signature was missing, if a permission was not in place, if a rubber stamp was applied so that a few millimeters of colored ink came down outside the box officially designated for them, whatever you were trying to achieve ground to a halt until the defect could be remedied.
When you were trying to get married, that wore on the nerves even more than it did any other time. Sarah was convinced it did, anyhow.
The real trouble was, the Nazis didn’t want Jews getting married to begin with. They wanted fewer Jews in Germany, not more of them. But, damn them, they weren’t altogether stupid. They recognized that Jews denied the right to marry would cohabit without benefit of ceremony and registration, and would then produce more little Jews in spite of everything. And so they didn’t deny them the right to marry. They just made it as hard as they possibly could.
After yet another infuriating and fruitless afternoon wandering the corridors of Munster’s city hall, Sarah trudged home ready-eager-to bite nails in half. “Those rotten, filthy pigdogs!” she snarled to anyone who would listen: which meant her mother and father.
“That crazy Kafka, in Austria, saw all of this foolishness coming right after the last war,” her father said. “He couldn’t get his stories published. People thought they were impossible nonsense. Everybody laughed at him. But he’d have the last laugh now, if he were still alive.”
“Was he a Jew? Did they kill him for being a Jew?” Sarah asked.
“He was a Jew, all right, but that’s not what killed him,” Father answered. “He had consumption, and he died of it. He died young, poor devil. Or maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to live to see that he knew what he was talking about after all.”
Sarah had no way to guess about that. She said, “For all the trouble they’re putting me through, you’d think I was marrying an Aryan.”
“You wouldn’t have any trouble with them then,” Mother said.
“Huh?” Sarah replied.
“They’d tell you no, and that would be that.”
Father nodded. “New marriages between Jews and Aryans are as verboten as Jews’ serving in the Wehrmacht. We can’t pollute the state with our blood, and we can’t shed our blood for the state, either.” He still sounded bitter about that.
“One of the clerks asked me for a certificate showing my Aryan bloodlines,” Sarah said. “He got mad when I couldn’t give him one, even though I had the Jewish star right where I was supposed to.” She patted the front of her ratty coat. Even brown coal was in short supply for Jews, and the inside of the house got almost as cold as the outside. All the Goldmans wore plenty of clothes all the time.
“Too bad you couldn’t,” Father said. “I’ve heard there are some Jews who’ve bought themselves an Aryan pedigree. I’m only sorry I don’t have the connections to do it myself.”
“Or the money,” Mother put in.
“Or that,” he agreed.
“I don’t want to be an Aryan. I just want to be what I am and not have people hate me on account of it,” Sarah said. “Is that too much to ask for?”
“I didn’t used to think so. I was a grown man before I had to wonder. These days, though, the answer seems to be yes-it is too much to ask for,” Samuel Goldman said.
“They took over not long before my thirteenth birthday,” Sarah said. No need to wonder who they were. “I don’t even know what it’s like, being a grown-up without laws against me.”
“Neither did my great-grandfathers, but the laws against them weren’t as bad as these, and they came off one by one instead of getting piled on again and again.” Father sighed. “I used to believe in progress. I really did. Now? Now I wonder. How can you help wondering?”
“You think it’s progress that a professor of ancient history and classics at the university should become one of Munster’s finest pavement repairers?” Mother said.
Sarah stared at her. Father was usually the one who came out with those sardonic gibes. Mother was sunnier-except, all of a sudden, she wasn’t anymore.
Father chuckled self-consciously. “You give me too much credit, sweetheart. If you don’t believe me, ask my gang boss. If I’m anything more than one of Munster’s slightly below average pavement repairers, I’d be amazed.” He turned back to Sarah. “So what did the clerk say when you couldn’t give him the piece of paper that would have made his heart go pitter-pat?”
“I told him I was a Jew. Like I said, he could already see I was, but I told him anyhow.”
“Good. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. And then?”
“Then he told me he’d have to talk with-to consult with, he said-his superior, so he could get orders about what to do. And he slammed down the brass bars in front of his window thing, and he went away, and he didn’t come back.”
“He’ll be there tomorrow,” Mother said.
“I know.” Sarah was anything but delighted. “That means I have to go back there again, too. Just what I want!”
“Is Isidor having as much trouble getting his permission?” Father asked.
“He was the last time I talked to him, a couple of days ago.” Sarah still wondered whether she’d done the right thing when she said yes. Even though she and Isidor pleased each other in bed or wherever else they could find a little privacy, she couldn’t make herself believe they had a grand passion. And wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about? She made herself finish answering: “He makes it sound as though he’s having more tsuris than I am.”
“Well, you’re prettier than he is,” Father said. “If you think that doesn’t make a difference, you’re crazy.”
“It shouldn’t,” Hanna Goldman said.
“Which wasn’t what I said,” her husband replied, and so it wasn’t.
“The Nazis are harder on Jewish men than they are on women,” Sarah said. “They haven’t thrown Mother and me into a labor gang, for instance.”
“They’re soft on women any way you look at it,” Father said. “From bits and pieces I’ve heard, the other countries that are fighting have put a lot more women into war plants than the Reich has.”
“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” Mother said, with no irony a microphone was likely to pick up. That was what the Nazis wanted out of women, all right: children, cooking, and going to church. Anything else, anything more, was modern and degenerate-two words that often marched side by side in National Socialist propaganda.
“It will be interesting to see how long they can keep that up if the war against the Russians drags on and on.” Father might have been talking about a bacteriologist’s experiment, with cultures of germs growing on agar-agar in Petri dishes. But he wasn’t. The Nazis experimented with human beings, with whole countries, with whole continents.
So did the Communists. Maybe the war would show that one bunch of those gangsters or the other was wrong. Maybe it would end up showing that both bunches of gangsters were wrong. It looked that way to Sarah.
Which proved… what, exactly? She could almost hear her father’s dry voice asking the question. They might be wrong, but they were running things. And the past eight years she’d seen, without any room for doubt, that who had the whip hand carried more weight than who happened to be right.
Nobody’d come looking for Adalbert Stoss. Nobody’d come looking for anyone using another name, either. As far as Theo Hossbach was concerned, sometimes-hell, often-the very best thing that could happen was nothing at all.
He’d considered telling Adi it would be smart not to play football any more, for fear of giving himself away. But Adi had thought of that for himself. Besides, telling him not to play didn’t have a prayer of working. Whenever a match was on, the panzer men clamored for him because he played so well. How was he supposed to say no to them when they did?
So Theo did what Theo did best: he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t see the Munich man who’d recognized Adi from a Munster football pitch again. Maybe the fellow’d stopped a mortar bomb with his face. Maybe his unit had got shipped hundreds of kilometers away, to shore up the line against Russian counterattacks from the south. Maybe… Maybe a million things.