Harry Turtledove - In The Presence Of My Enemies

"Was ist hier los?"A man's voice-a teacher's voice-stopped the exuberance in its tracks where nothing else would have. "Alicia Gimpel, tell me at once."

"Jawohl, Herr Peukert." All panting and sweaty, Alicia paused. "It's nothing,Herr Peukert. We're just…happy,Herr Peukert."

Would he ask why they were happy? Would their being loud and disorderly count for more? It would have with a lot of teachers.Herr Peukert kept right on looking stern. But then, slowly and thoughtfully, he nodded. "Happy is not a bad thing for children to be. You may continue." He turned his back on the circle. He didn't turn around when the dancing started again.

"He knows why," Francesca whispered to Alicia. "He knows, but he doesn't care." Wonder filled her face.

"Nobody cares about what happened to the Beast." Alicia corrected herself: "Except that she's gone, I mean." She couldn't think of a better reason to dance.

When lunch ended and students went into their classrooms again, hers buzzed with the news. Nobody could hold still. Nobody could keep quiet. A lot of Alicia's classmates had suffered through a year with Frau Koch. Some of the ones who hadn't had a brother or sister who had, the way Alicia did. And all the boys and girls knew what the Beast was like.

Herr Peukert put up with it longer than Alicia thought he would. At last, though, he said, "Enough. If you want to dance at lunch or after school, that's your business. When you're here, though, we have work to do. You may not care about it now, but some of it will be important later on. Kindly buckle down and pay attention."

And they did, or most of them did. The bargain seemed fair to Alicia. The boys and girls-mostly boys-who kept on being noisy were the ones who were always noisy in class.Herr Peukert had a lot more patience than Herr Kessler had, but he didn't own an infinite supply. He gave the loudest, most obnoxious boy a swat. The whack of paddle on backside did an amazing job of calming the others down.

Nobody on the bus going home told the children to be quiet. They giggled and squealed and sang songs, most of them about the things a Beast did in the woods. They would have danced in the aisle, but that was too much for the long-suffering bus driver. "You got to stay in your seats," he shouted over the din in the bus. "You got to. Them's the rules, by God."

The children did sit down. Maybe that was simply fear about what would happen to them if they didn't, but maybe it was something more, too. In the Reich, few arguments carried more weight thanthem's the rules. The rules and good order went hand in hand, and German children learned to obey along with their other lessons.

But we wouldn't obey Lothar Prutzmann, even if the Beast thought we ought to,Alicia thought. Then something else crossed her mind-what do you mean, we?She couldn't automatically think of herself as a German any more. That was what being a Jew did to her: it made her an outsider in her own country.

Part of her still wished for the feeling of belonging she'd had before she found out what she was. But, considering a lot of the things Germans had done, maybe being on the outside looking in was the better part of the bargain.

Had Lise Gimpel expected miracles from the new Reichstag, she would have been disappointed. Since she expected very little, she found herself pleasantly surprised every now and again. The delegates chose Rolf Stolle as their Speaker. The Gauleiter used his new bully pulpit to go right on slanging Heinz Buckliger for not doing enough, and for not doing it fast enough. That didn't surprise Lise at all.

Laws cutting back the powers of the SS did. So did the public hangings of a couple of Lothar Prutzmann's chief henchmen. The dangling bodies-shown on the evening news-declared the new laws had teeth. The lesson was unsubtle and thoroughly Nazi, but no less effective for that.

Holland held elections, too, and chose a parliament with a non-Fascist majority. Panzers didn't roll. The German Foreign Ministry said not a word. Dutchmen didn't dance in the streets. They didn't seem to want to give the Reich any excuse to change its mind. Lise couldn't blame them.

As summer gave way to fall, Heinrich said the Americans were getting friskier than ever. "What will they do?" Lise asked him. "Will they try to rebel?"

"I don't think so. I hope not," her husband answered. "That would be just what…some people needed." He still spoke carefully. The house might be bugged.

"How hard would the government…the way it is now…try to stop them?"

"I don't know that, either," Heinrich said. "But if the government…the way it is now…didn't try to stop them, I don't think it would be the government for very long."

"But they really have put a boot on the SS's neck," Lise protested.

"I wasn't talking about the SS. I was talking about the Wehrmacht, " Heinrich said. "The Army won't put up with weakness here, and it won't want to let the Yankees get too strong. They aren't like the Dutch or the Czechs. They could be rivals. They could be worse rivals than the Empire of Japan, because they're more like us. The Wehrmacht wouldn't like that at all, and how can you blame it?"

Lise eyed her husband before answering. He'd tacked on the last half dozen words, she judged, to keep anyone on the other end of a bug happy. "Who possibly could?" she said in the same spirit. "After it broke up the Putsch, who could blame it for anything?"

Heinrich started to nod, then caught himself and wagged a finger at her, as if to say,Naughty, naughty. Lise stuck out her tongue. Maybe she'd meant you couldn't blame the Wehrmacht for anything because it hadn't done anything blameworthy. Or maybe she'd meant you didn't dare blame it for anything, because it was the greatest power in the land. Which? Her green eyes dancing, she shook her head. She was a woman. She was entitled to her mysteries. And she wasn't altogether sure herself.

"What about the Czechs?" she asked, changing the subject a little. "Will the Reich let them go?"

Her husband shrugged. "Beats me. They have the vote last summer to back up their declaration of independence. And if anybody can outfinagle the Foreign Ministry, it's the fellow they've got leading Unity. He can make you feel ashamed when you do something that isn't on the up-and-up, and how many people are able to do that? But…"

"Yes. But." Lise knew why Heinrich hesitated. The Czechs were Slavs, and Slavs, even Slavs like the Czechs who'd been entangled in German affairs since time out of mind, were in the National Socialist way of thinking Untermenschen. If you once started making concessions to Untermenschen, didn't you acknowledge they might not be so inferior after all? And if you acknowledged that, how did you justify the massacres and the slave labor that had filled the last seventy years?

Even more to the point, if you acknowledged that Slavs-or some Slavs-might not be Untermenschen, didn't you take a step towards acknowledging that Jews also might not be Untermenschen?Could a National Socialist government take a step in that direction?

"the Fuhrer has said mistakes were made in years gone by," Heinrich said; if the Fuhrer said it, it couldn't possibly be treasonous-as long as he stayed Fuhrer. "If we decide to set some of those mistakes to rights, that wouldn't be so bad."

"No. Of course it wouldn't," Lise answered. Even though the Czechs were doing most of the agitating these days, they'd got off relatively easy. How could the Reich make amends to the relative handful of Poles and Russians and Ukrainians who still survived?

And, for that matter, how could the Reich make amends to the handful of Jews who, in spite of everything, still survived? Lise knew an impossibility when she saw one. Come to that, she didn't want a parade of blackshirts and Party Bonzen clicking their heels and apologizing to her. That sort of spectacle might appeal to Susanna, but then Susanna reveled in opera. All Lise wanted was to be left alone, to get on with her life regardless of what she happened to be.