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Raucous cheers said the crowd on the Kurfurstendamm sidewalks did. People were less restrained now than they had been while Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer. They'd begun to see that they could say some of the things that had been on their minds for years without worrying that the Security Police would bundle them into a car and haul them off to prison or to a camp.
But they aren't Jews,Esther thought, wondering how Heinrich was holding up-and whether he was still holding out. She wondered about Alicia, too. What would they do to a child? No one had come to bundle her into a car. That was all she knew. In an important way, that was all she needed to know.
"Things will look different once we elect a real Reichstag!" Rolf Stolle roared. "Too many have got away with too much for too long. We're going to show the world where the bodies are buried-and we all know there are lots of them."
More cheers. More shouts. People around Esther waved their fists in the air. She stared at Stolle. He couldn't be talking about Jews…could he? She grimaced. Odds were against it. Plenty of Germans-and others-had gone missing during the Third Reich. Who would get excited about millions of Jews now? Odds were, no one. After the First World War, who'd got excited about all the Armenians the Turks did in? Nobody. Hitler had seen as much, and noted it in Mein Kampf. And he'd been dead right. Yes, that was the word.
"Some people-some people with fancy jobs and even fancier uniforms-are going to have a lot of explaining to do," Stolle declared. "Will they be able to do it? Good question. Damn good question. We'll find out."
Then he broke out of the parade and away from his bodyguards and plunged into the crowd. Alarm on their faces, the Berlin cops rushed after the Gauleiter. He might have forgotten they existed. He'd spotted a tall, pretty blond woman on the sidewalk. She squeaked in surprise as he squeezed her, kissed her on both cheeks and then on the mouth, and very likely took a few other liberties Esther couldn't see.
"There!" he said, gri
"Uh,ja, " she stammered, sounding as dazed as a hurricane survivor. Men whooped. Women laughed. Rolf Stolle not only had a reputation, he reveled in it.
He elbowed his way back through the crowd and into the procession down the Kurfurstendamm once more. "Weare the Volk!" he roared through the bullhorn. "This is a Volkisch state. Everybody says that, but nobody says what it means. It means the state is ours, that's what. Weare the Volk!"
"We are the Volk!" People picked up the rallying cry. "Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!"
When Heinz Buckliger started calling for reform, had he expectedthis? As Esther ducked into a haberdasher's, she shook her head. She couldn't believe it. But, whether the Fuhrer had expected this or not, this was what he had. And what would he do about it?
Now that Lise had the house straight again, she went through the motions of everyday life. With Heinrich and the girls gone, all she could do was go through the motions. Nothing she did seemed to mean anything. How could it, without the people who gave it meaning?
She fixed food for herself and ate it as if she were fueling a machine that needed to keep going. She had trouble figuring outwhy it needed to keep going: more in case her husband and daughters came back than for any independent reason.
Mechanically, she washed her few dishes. Once that was done, she kept having to find a way to get through the rest of the evening till it was time to try to sleep. She didn't want to watch the news. Horst Witzleben's half-hour suddenly seemed full of nothing but bright, shining lies. People all over the Germanic Empire were demanding their freedom or exulting in new freedom won. Up until a few days before, Lise had exulted with them. Now, with Heinrich in jail and the children stolen, other people's celebrations seemed a grim mockery.
She cleaned things that didn't need cleaning and read a novel where she knew she was missing one word in three. Every hour or two, she would look up at the clock on the mantel and discover another ten minutes had gone by. Most of her wished she were in captivity with the rest of her family. Staying free didn't make her feel safe-only guilty.
When the phone rang, she put down the novel without a trace of regret. It wasn't as if she were paying attention to it anyhow. Maybe it was her sister; Kathe owed her a call. Even if the line was bugged, the two of them could talk pretty openly. No snoop could penetrate their pauses and misdirections.
"Bitte?"Lise said.
"Guten Abend,Lise." It wasn't Kathe: it was a man. Lise just had time to shift gears and recognize Willi Dorsch's voice before he said, "I'm so sorry."
"Oh, my God!" Lise blurted. Those words, at this time, were the last thing, the very last thing, she wanted to hear. "What do you know, Willi? What have you heard? Tell me right this second, before I reach down the telephone line and pull it out of you with both hands!"
By what felt like a miracle, he understood her right away and didn't try to joke around. "Nothing about Heinrich-nothing, I swear," he said quickly. "But Erika's in the hospital. They think she'll be all right, but she's there."
"Wait," Lise said. Too many things were happening too fast-much too fast for her to follow. "If Erika's in the hospital, I'm the one who's supposed to be sorry, not you."
"I'm not so sure about that." Willi sounded most unhappy. He also sounded-embarrassed?
"Willi, please take this one step at a time. You're way,way ahead of me," Lise said. "First tell me why Erika's in the hospital."
"Well, she took too many pills. Took them on purpose."
"Why on earth would she do that?" Lise asked in honest amazement. "Not because you've been fooling around on her, for heaven's sake. That wouldn't do it. She'd get even instead."
A considerable silence followed. Mostly to himself, Willi muttered, "I might have known you'd know about that." Another silence, this one punctuated by a sigh. He gathered himself and went on: "You're not wrong. She did try to get even, only it didn't work out the way she wanted. That's…some of why she took the pills."
"You'd better tell me the rest of this." Lise thought she knew where he was going, but she wasn't sure, and she didn't want to guess, not here. Too much rode on whether she was right or wrong.
"Well…" Yet another long pause. "It seems she was trying to get even with me with, uh, with Heinrich, of all people."
Lise almost laughed at how surprised he sounded. He'd never dreamt of Heinrich as a rival. She thought her husband was pretty hot stuff. Why wouldn't another woman? But that was a question for a different time. All she said now was, "Go on."
"You know about that, too," Willi said in dismay. Lise didn't deny it. "Why doesn't anybody tell me these things?" he wondered aloud.
"Never mind that now," Lise said, as if there were reasons galore but she had no time to go into them. "Just get on with it, please."
"I guess Heinrich told her no?" Even though Willi put an audible question mark at the end of the sentence, he didn't really sound as if he doubted it. With a sigh, he continued, "Erika…doesn't like people telling her no. And so…and so she…God damn it, Lise, I'mso sorry." Willi's usually cheerful voice held something not far from a sob.
"She was the one who accused Heinrich of being a Jew?" Lise couldn't hear anything at all in her own voice. The words might have come from the throat of some machine. She'd been right, sure enough.
"I'm afraid she was," Willi answered miserably. "He said something about acting like Solomon and cutting a doll in half, and Solomon was King of the Jews, and that put the idea in her mind, I suppose. But she never thought about the children. When she found out about them, that was when she…did what she did."