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Heinrich hung up, too. Rubbing at his ear, he pulled a message pad from his top desk drawer.Erika called while you were out, he wrote.No need to call her back. If she wanted to deliver any more forceful message, she could do it herself. He put the small sheet of yellow paper on Willi's desk. It didn't spontaneously combust. As he retreated to his own desk, he wondered why.
Willi came back to the office about half an hour later. He looked almost indecently pleased with himself-and that probably was the word for it, too. Ilse, by contrast, just sat down and started typing. Willi picked up the message. "What's this?" he said. He read it and set it down, then started to laugh. He looked over at Heinrich. "What did she really say?"
"You can ask her yourself and find out," Heinrich answered.
"No, thanks." Willi laughed again. "She thinks the world revolves around her. High time she finds out she's wrong."
Don't you do the same?Heinrich wondered. But he couldn't ask Willi that, any more than he could have asked Erika about the way she thought. Neither one of them would have taken the question seriously, and they both would have got angry at him. He wanted that no more than he wanted any other kind of notice.
Willi said, "You're our fair-haired boy right now. Why don't you fix Erika up with Buckliger? That would make everybody happy."
"You really are out of your mind!" Heinrich exclaimed in horror.
"Thank you," Willi said, which only disconcerted him more. "I thought it was the-what do you call it?-the elegant solution, that's what I'm trying to say."
"Shall I tell you all the things that are wrong with it?" Heinrich asked. "How much time have you got? Have you got all day? Have you got all week?"
"What I've got is a report to write." Willi looked lugubrious. "The boss wants it this afternoon, too. I'm going to have to rush like hell to finish it on time."
"You wouldn't, if-" Heinrich broke off. Telling Willi he'd have less to do now if he hadn't spent a long, long lunchtime screwing his secretary was true. Some true things, though, just weren't helpful.
"Yes, Mommy," Willi said, which proved this was indeed one of those things.
"All right. All right." Nothing a
"I did. A nice, close look, too." Willi's expression left no doubt what he meant.
Heinrich found nothing to say to that, which was no doubt exactly what Willi'd had in mind. Shaking his head, he went back to work. Over at the other desk, Willi looked as desperately busy as a man juggling knives and torches. He would type like a man possessed, then shift to the calculator, mutter at the results, and go back to the keyboard.
At five o'clock, Heinrich got up. He put on his coat and his cap. "I'm heading for the bus stop," he said. "Are you coming?"
"No, dammit." Willi shook his head, looking harassed. "I'm still busy."
"Too bad," Heinrich said, and left. Willi stared after him, then plunged back into the report.
IX
WHEN SUSANNA WEISS LISTENED TO THE RADIO IN HER OFFICE, she usually hunted for Mozart or Handel or Haydn or Beethoven or Bach. Verdi or Vivaldi would do in a pinch. The Italians were reckoned frivolous, but they were still allies; you couldn't get in trouble for listening to them.
She sometimes let Wagner blare out into the hallway, too. That was protective coloration, pure and simple, and not only because she despised him as an anti-Semite. No matter how the Nazis had slobbered over him for the past eighty years and more, she couldn't take him seriously.
A lone, lorn woman stands upon a stage trying to make herself heard,an Englishman had written at the start of the twentieth century.One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman's voice to be heard above their din. She'd seen it that way long before she ran into Jerome K. Jerome. Now she couldn't even listen to Wagner without wanting to giggle.
These days, though, less classical music lilted from the radio. She tuned it to the news station more and more often. A lot of what she heard was the same wretched sort of propaganda she'd avoided for years.
A lot of it, but not all. Every so often, startling things came out of the speaker. She listened in the hope of hearing more of them.
Whenever the Fuhrer made a speech, she found herself urging him on, thinking,You can do it. I know you can. And sometimes Heinz Buckliger would, and sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he was flat and pedestrian, praising manufacture or agriculture or the Hitler Youth. Then, as she had with too many boyfriends, she decided she'd been fooling herself. She'd been right about the boyfriends. About Buckliger…
The trouble with Buckliger was, he could be astonishing. She was discussing a midterm with a student who had trouble understanding why he'd got only a 73. Susa
Susa
But then, with just a few words, everything changed. Buckliger went on, "We must examine the history of the Reich in the same way: that which is good, and also that which is not so good. We must not flinch from finding and noting our forefathers' failures."
"Fraulein Doktor Professor, I think you should raise my grade because-"
"Wait," Susa
"Those who complain about the recent emphasis on the first edition of Mein Kampf ignore certain essential facts," Heinz Buckliger went on. "It is perfectly obvious that inadequate representation by the Volk was at the root of past illegalities, arbitrariness, and repression-crimes based on abuse of power."
"Professor Weiss-" The student tried again.
"Hush, I told you," Susa
And Buckliger wasn't done. He said, "The responsibility of past National Socialist leaders"-he didn't name Hitler or Himmler, but whom else could he mean?-"and those close to them for undoubted repressions and illegalities is both difficult to forgive and difficult to admit. But we must. Even now, writers try to ignore important questions in our history. They try to pretend nothing out of the ordinary occurred. This is wrong. It neglects historical reality, of which we all must be aware."
He paused for applause. He got…a little. Had Susa