In The Presence of mine Enemies

by Harry Turtledove

  "Now ask me if I care," Willi answered. "The way my head's banging, I'm not going to worry about anything farther south."

  He winced when the train came up, even though it was powered by electricity, and not nearly so noisy or smelly as a steam engine or a diesel locomotive would have been. He let Heinrich sit by the window, and pulled his cap down low on his forehead to keep as much light as he could out of his eyes. When the train got moving, he pretended to read the Volkischer Beobachter, but his yawns and his glazed expression said it was just pretense.

  Heinrich, by contrast, went through the paper with his usual care. He tapped a story on page three. "The Fuhrer 's going to speak on the televisor tomorrow night."

  "Be still, my beating heart." Willi was indifference personified. "I've heard a speech or two-thousand-in my time."

  "I know, I know. Most of the time, I'd say the same thing." Heinrich tapped the Beobachter again. "But don't you think this particular speech might be interesting, after what he said in Nuremburg?"

  "Nobody knows what he said in Nuremburg-nobody except the Bonzen, and they aren't talking much," Willi replied. But he'd heard the same rumors Heinrich had; he'd heard some of themfrom Heinrich. And maybe the aspirins and coffee were starting to work, for he did perk up a little. "All right, maybe it will be interesting," he admitted. "You never can tell."

  "If he's serious about some of the things he said there-"

  "The things people say he said there," Willi broke in.

  "Yes, the things people say he said there." Heinrich nodded. "If he said them, and if he meant them-"

  Willi interrupted again: "Half the people-more than half the people-will watch the football game anyhow, or the cooking show, or the one about the SS man where the American spy's always right on the edge of falling out of her dress. I swear she will one of these days."

  Heinrich was damned if he'd let his friend outdo him for cynicism. "She won't when she's on opposite the Fuhrer 's speech," he answered. "The programming director's head would roll if she ended up stealing that much of the audience."

  "Mm, you've got a point there," Willi said. "Too bad." He managed a bloodshot leer.

  "South Station!" came the call as the train glided to a halt. "All out for South Station!" Heinrich hurried up the escalators to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Willi shambled along after him like something created in a mad scientist's experiment that hadn't quite worked.

  As soon as they got to the office, Willi headed off to the canteen. He returned with a large foam cup of coffee in each hand, and poured them both down in record time. Not surprisingly, he went to the men's room shortly thereafter, and then again a few minutes later. "Vitamin P," he said sheepishly when he came back after the second trip. "And speaking of Vitamin P, why didn't you tell me my eyes looked like two pissholes in the snow?"

  "What could you have done if I had?" Heinrich asked.

  "Well, nothing, but even so…" Willi opened those vein-tracked eyes very wide now. "I'm awake. I may live. I may even decide I want to."

  Ilse came up to set some papers on his desk. She started to turn away, then stopped and did one of the better double takes Heinrich had seen. "Good God! What happened to you?" she said, almost exactly echoing his words of an hour earlier.

  "Erika and I had a small disagreement last night," Willi answered. "Yes, that's about right. Just a small disagreement."

  "You poor dear!" Ilse was the very picture of sympathy, fussing over him, straightening his collar, and generally making him feel three meters tall. He lapped it up like a cat in front of a bowl of cream. Heinrich had to suppress a strong impulse to retch. On the other hand, he wondered how long it had been since Erika buttered Willi up like that. Such artful dodges weren't her style.

  Later that morning, Willi said, "I'm going to lunch with Ilse today."

  "Why am I not surprised?" The tart retort came out of Heinrich's mouth before he could stop it.

  His friend turned red. "I don't know. Why aren't you? You've got things going good for you now, so you get all sanctimonious. If you were the one with troubles, I wouldn't look down my nose at you."

  "You wouldn't? What's the fun in having a nose if you don't look down it?" Heinrich replied, even more deadpan than usual.

  Willi looked at him, started to say something, and then started to laugh instead. "Dammit, how am I supposed to stay angry at you when you come back with things like that?"

  "If you work at it, I expect you'll manage," Heinrich said, again with next to no inflection in his voice. He got another laugh from Willi, too, although he hadn't been joking.

  Ilse snuggled up to Willi as they walked toward the door. Willi slipped his arm around her waist. Heinrich went back to his paperwork.Would I do something like that if I were having trouble with Lise? he wondered.Who knows? Maybe I would. But he had trouble imagining trouble with Lise.Maybe I don't understand how lucky I am.

  The telephone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich was going to let it keep ringing till whoever was on the other end got sick of it and hung up. But what if it turned out to be somebody with important business? He picked up his own phone and dialed Willi's extension to transfer the call. "Analysis-this is Heinrich Gimpel."

  "Oh, hello, Heinrich-I wanted to talk to Willi." That was Erika Dorsch's voice. Heinrich winced. He wished he'd let the phone ring. When he didn't answer right away, she asked, "Where is he?" in a way he didn't like at all.

  He responded with the exact and literal truth: "You missed him by two minutes-he just went to lunch."

  "And he didn't go with you, obviously," Erika said. Heinrichreally wished he hadn't answered the telephone. Willi's wife went on, "Did he go with the lovely and talented Ilse instead?"

  "I, ah, didn't see him leave," Heinrich said, which was true in the highly technical sense that he'd looked down at the papers on his desk before Willi actually opened the door.

  "Now tell me another one, Heinrich. You aren't much of a liar, you know," Erika said. The way she meant it, that might have been true. In several ways she knew nothing about, it couldn't have been more wrong. That she knew nothing about those several ways proved how wrong it was.

  He said, "Erika, I'm not his father. I'm not his watchdog, either. I don't keep an eye on him every minute."

  "Somebody ought to," Erika Dorsch said bitterly. "Is something wrong with me, Heinrich? Am I ugly? Am I unattractive?"

  "You ought to know better than that," he said, too surprised at the question not to give her an honest answer.

  "Should I?" she said. "If something isn't wrong with me, why have we only made love six or seven times this year? Why is Willi going around with that round-heeled little chippie instead of me?"

  "I don't know," Heinrich answered, which was also certainly true. If he'd had a choice between…But he didn't have choices like that, so what was the point of imagining he did? He said, "Don't you think you'd do better asking Willi? He might actually tell you."

  "He'd tell me a load of garbage. That's what he's been telling me all along," Erika said. "What's he been telling you? That's probably more garbage."

  Heinrich pretended not to hear her. Bad enough to have to listen to both sides in a dissolving marriage. To tell tales from one to the other…He shook his head. No. He didn't know much about such things, but he knew better than that.

  "Can you get a little time off?" she asked. "If you come over here, I can tell you how things really are."

  What was that supposed to mean? What it sounded like? If it did, would he kick himself for the rest of his days if he said no? Most red-blooded males would. He could arrange things so Lise never knew, and…

  "Erika," he said gently, "I don't think that would be a good idea right now."

  "No?" She sounded tragic. "You mean you don't want me, either?"

  "I-" He stopped. One more question for which there was no safe answer. He did his best: "I'm married to Lise, remember? I like being married to Lise. I want to stay married to her." He look
ed around to make sure nobody in the big room was paying too much attention to him. He couldn't do anything about anyone who might monitor the call. It wouldn't land him in trouble, anyhow. He consoled himself with that.

  A long, long silence followed. At last, Erika said, "I didn't know people talked that way any more. Well." Another silence. "She's luckier than she knows-or else you can't get it up, either." The line went dead.

  Heinrich stared at the telephone, then slowly replaced the handset in the cradle. He'd been ready to sympathize with Erika-even if he wasn't ready to go to bed with her-and to think Willi was a louse and a fool for not giving her more of what she obviously wanted. But if she kept making cracks like that, he didn't see how he could sympathize with either one of them-except they were both his friends. He muttered something that didn't help and trudged off to the canteen.

  Susanna Weiss loved good food. What she didn't love was cooking. She should have; learning to cook, and to be happy cooking, was drummed into girls in the Greater German Reich in school and in the Bund deutscher Madel. With Susanna, it hadn't taken. With Susanna, the more something was drummed into her, the less likely to take it was.

  Frozen and freeze-dried food had come a long way since she was a girl. A lot of the advances had been military first; nothing was too good for the Reich 's soldiers and sailors. Little by little, things had trickled out to the civilian world as well. A faint stigma still clung to eating such food too often. It said you were lazy, or you didn't care enough about your family to take care of them yourself. Being a Jew, Susanna didn't worry about stigmas that were merely faint. And she was convinced she had better things to do with her time than stand in front of a stove. When she ate in her flat, she had frozen or freeze-dried food most of the time.

  She was eating beef stroganoff that had started life in a plastic pouch when Heinz Buckliger came on the televisor screen. The Russians, those who were left alive, had been pushed east far past the Urals. Some of their recipes lingered on in the Germany they couldn't hope to threaten for generations.

  Recorded, abridged versions of" Deutschland uber Alles" and the "Horst Wessel Song" prefaced the Fuhrer 's appearance. The screen cut to an image of the Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws to the Fuhrer 's study. Like so much Nazi architecture, the room was on a heroic scale that did its best to dwarf the man who occupied it. The walls of red marble with ebony wainscoting rose nearly ten meters to the cofferwork ceiling of rosewood. The televisor camera panned slowly, lovingly, along those walls. Along with gilded Party symbols, they held portraits of Bismarck, Hitler, Himmler, and a new one-over which the camera lingered-of Kurt Haldweim looking Viennese and aristocratic and more than a little snooty.

  The picture cut away to the Fuhrer 's desk. The cabinetmakers who'd created insanely ornate inlaid furniture for French noblemen during the Old Regime would have owned they'd met their match in the craftsmen who made that desk. On the wall behind it hung a genuine Gobelin tapestry from the seventeenth century. Next to the tapestry, a German flag hung limply from a pole. Another gilded swastika-bearing eagle topped that pole.

  As the camera shot tightened to the tawny leather chair in which Heinz Buckliger sat, the flag remained at the edge of the picture. Susanna had seen that whenever she watched a speech from the Fuhrer. Tonight, she really noticed it, which was not the same thing. She gave a grudging nod of approval. Party propagandists didn't miss a trick. Of course they associated the head of state with the state itself. That they did it so shedidn't consciously notice most of the time was a testimony to their skill.

  Then she noticed something else, and her eyes widened. Heinz Buckliger was wearing a plain gray suit, not a Party uniform. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen any Fuhrer in civilian clothes. She wondered if she ever had. She didn't think so. Buckliger's necktie was of a red that perfectly matched the flag. After a moment, she saw it bore a pattern: small black swastikas. Any men's-wear store might have sold it.

  What did that say? What did it mean? Anyone alert who watched the televisor looked for meanings behind meanings, for what was said without a word being spoken. What was Buckliger trying to get across here? All Susanna could think of was,I'm as patriotic as the next fellow, but I'm transposing the tune into a new key.

  "Good evening, citizens of the Greater German Reich, " the Fuhrer said. "Not long ago, in Nuremberg, I spoke to officials of the National Socialist Party about some of the problems I see facing the Reich and the Germanic Empire. You also need to know some of the things I told them."

  As who in the Reich had not, Susanna had seen films of Hitler. He'd dominated, whether screaming for war or vengeance, pleading for greater effort, or cajoling people into sacrifice. Himmler, who'd led Greater Germany and the Empire when she was a child, had dominated in a different way. His style was flatter than Hitler's, but you could sense the iron underneath. If you caused trouble, you would get it-in the neck. Kurt Haldweim had talked down to people, as if convinced he knew things no one else did. If he happened to be wrong, who was going to tell him? And if he happened to be wrong, would he ever admit it? Not likely.

  Heinz Buckliger simply…spoke. "For a good many years now, we have been living off the great deeds of our ancestors," he said. "And our ancestorswere great men who did great things. But we are like a family that lives off an inheritance from Grandpa, doesn't take care of its money very well, and doesn't have enough people in it who have gone out and looked for work on their own. After a while, the inheritance runs dry, and they have to figure out what to do next.

  "I want to try to figure out what to do nextbefore we run dry. We have plundered much of the world. But how long can that go on? Many of the folk of Western Europe and North America are as Aryan as we are. How long can we justify in racial terms their continued exploitation?"

  Charlie Lynton had said things like that at the gathering of the British Union of Fascists. Susanna hadn't expected to hear them from him. Hearing them from the Fuhrer was like a thunderclap. Like Lynton, Buckliger was using fascist ideology to cloak doing things that would have appalled his predecessors.

  "Further conquest is not an option for us, as it was for Hitler and Himmler," he continued. "Forty years ago, we were lucky the United States didn't do us more damage. We could bring the Empire of Japan to its knees tomorrow-but if we did, Japan would bring us to our knees, too. Both we and the Japanese have too many rockets to make war anything but mutual suicide.

  "So what are we to do? Things aren't the way they were in our fathers' time, and they certainly aren't the way they were in our grandfathers' time. Do we go on looking at our troubles in the same old way? This, it seems to me, is foolishness. When Hitler saw the Reich with troubles that were new in his time, did he answer them the way his parents and grandparents had? Of course not! He changed with the times. We must always change with the times, or the times will change without us."

  "He's doing it again!" Susanna exclaimed, too excited to keep quiet. Fascist ideology didn't lend itself to change. What was fascism, after all, but reaction on the march? But, like Charlie Lynton, Heinz Buckliger had seen that, if he appealed to well-established authority to justify the changes he was making, he might have a chance of getting away with them. The Party Bonzen — and the Party rank and file-were surely listening to him along with everybody else. What did they think? Did they understand what they were hearing?

  Or am I the one who's wrong?Susanna wondered.Am I hearing what I want to hear, listening with my heart and not my head? The last time she'd done that was with the boyfriend who'd turned out to be a lush, the one Heinrich still teased her about every now and then.

  She cursed softly. Lost in her own thoughts, she'd missed a few sentences of what Buckliger was saying. "…greater responsiveness to the needs and desires of the Volk as a whole," was where she started paying attention again. "Of course we cannot and will not challenge the primacy of the Party and of National Socialist ideals, but are we not all Aryans together?"

  When he sai
dof course, he sometimes meant anything but. How many people would see that? Instead of going into detail, as she'd hoped he would, he continued, "This is a topic I will return to in times to come. Staying on old ground is always safe and certain. That is the reason so many of us like it so well. Finding a new way is harder. We may make mistakes. We probably will. But, if we keep going long enough, we will find ourselves in a place we never could have reached by sticking with the tried and true. Let us make the journey together. Good night." the Fuhrer 's study vanished from Susanna's televisor screen-from televisor screens all over the Reich. Horst Witzleben's familiar newsroom replaced it. The broadcaster said, "That was, of course, Heinz

  Buckliger,Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire." When Witzleben saidof course, he meant it. He blinked a couple of times before going on, "An extraordinary address. A memorable address. the Fuhrer set his mark on the Reich. As he leads us, as he guides us, so we shall go. That is our only proper-indeed, our only possible-course. A new era is upon us, and in times to come, as the Fuhrer said, we shall learn exactly what this means. For now, good night, and I return you to your regularly scheduled programming."

  Regularly scheduled programming was a vacuous quiz show. To Susanna, the hardest question was why anyone would watch it. People did, though. She heard them talking about it.

  Whatshe wanted to talk about was Buckliger's speech. She hurried to the telephone.The Gimpels or the Stutzmans? she wondered as she picked it up. After a moment's hesitation, though, she replaced the handset in the cradle without calling anyone. After a speech like that, weren't the phone lines too likely to be monitored? And wasn't she likely to be under some suspicion anyhow, as someone who knew the Kleins? Better safe than sorry. That wasn't heroic, but it was probably smart.