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“Maybe it’s the weather,” Drucker muttered under his breath. In wintertime this far north, the sun rose late and set early and never climbed very far above the southern horizon. Mists from the sea often obscured it even during the brief hours when it condescended to appear at all. Most days from November to February, streetlights shone around the clock. But they could not make up for the sun, any more than a distant cousin could make up for a missing mother.
Drucker wished that particular figure of speech had not occurred to him. He wished he’d had no cause to think of it. He glanced over to Kathe, who sat in the front seat beside him, with the children crowded into the back. She smiled. For once, evidently, she hadn’t guessed what he was thinking.
“When we go into the shops, you will not come with me,” she said, as much at home with giving orders as Major General Dornberger. “I want your present to be a surprise.”
“All right,” he agreed, so mildly that she gave him a suspicious stare. He returned it as blandly as he had turned aside the Gestapo interrogation earlier in the year. “After all, I want to get you a surprise or two myself.”
“Hans-” She shook her head. Light brown curls flew. “Hans, I am here. That is your doing. What greater present could you give me?”
“Greater? I don’t know.” Drucker shrugged, and then, steering the Volkswagen as precisely as if it were the upper stage of an A-45, took for his own a parking space into which it barely fit. That done, he gave his wife his attention once more. “I can go on giving you things if I want to, I think. And I do want to.”
Kathe leaned across the gearshift and kissed him on the cheek. In the back seat, Claudia giggled. She was at the age where public displays of affection amused, horrified, and fascinated her all at the same time. Drucker supposed he ought to count his blessings. All too soon, she’d likely put on public displays of affection that would horrify him without amusing him in the slightest.
“Heinrich, for whom will you shop?” Kathe asked.
Drucker’s older son said, “Why, for you and Father, of course. And for-” He broke off, two words too late, and turned red.
“For Ilse,” Claudia said; she was becoming an accomplished tease. “When are you going to give her your Hitler Youth pin, Heinrich?” Her voice was sweet and sticky as treacle.
Heinrich turned redder still. “That’s none of your business, you little snoop. You’re not the Gestapo.”
“Nobody should be the Gestapo,” Adolf said fiercely. “The Gestapo doesn’t do anything but cause trouble for people.”
Privately, Drucker agreed with that. Privately, he’d said much worse than that. But Adolf was only ten. He couldn’t be relied upon to keep private what absolutely had to be kept private. Drucker said, “The Gestapo does do more than that. They hunt down traitors to the Reich and rebels and spies for the Lizards and the Bolsheviks and the Americans.”
“They tried to hunt down Mother,” Adolf said. “They can-” The phrase he used would have made a Feldwebel with thirty years’ experience as a noncom blush.
“Keep a civil tongue in your head, young man,” Drucker told him, hoping he sounded severe. He’d never said anything like that about the Gestapo, even if he agreed with the sentiment expressed. “You must always keep a civil tongue in your head, for your family may not be the only people listening to you. What would happen to you, do you suppose, if the Gestapo had planted a microphone in our auto?”
Adolf looked appalled. Drucker had hoped he would. Drucker also hoped-devoutly-that the Gestapo hadn’t planted a microphone in the VW. Such a thing was far from impossible. The snoops might have planted one to see if they could catch Kathe admitting her grandmother was a Jew. Or they might have planted it in the hope of hearing some other seditious statement.
Adults-adults with a gram of sense, anyhow-watched what they said as automatically as they breathed. Children had to learn they couldn’t shout out the first thing that came into their heads. If they didn’t learn fast, they didn’t last long.
“Just remember,” Drucker told his son-told all three of his children, actually, “no matter what you think, no matter how good your reasons for thinking it may be, what you say is a different business. Nobody can hear what you think. You never can tell who might hear what you say.” He paused a moment to let the lesson sink in, then went on, “Now let’s not say any more about it. Let’s go shopping and see what sorts of nice things the stores have in them.”
He remembered the war years and the ones right after the fighting. In those days, the stores had had next to nothing in them. They’d tried to trick out the nothing with tinsel and candles, but hadn’t had much luck. Now, though, the lean times were over. The German people could enjoy themselves again.
Kathe went off in one direction, with Claudia and Adolf in tow. Heinrich made his own way down the street. Maybe he was shopping for Ilse. Had Drucker been his son’s age, he would have gone shopping for her; he was sure of that.
As things were, he went shopping for his wife. He found an excellent buy on Limoges porcelain at a shop not far from the town council hall. The shop stocked a wide variety of goods imported from France, all at very reasonable prices. He remarked on that as he made his purchase. “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, nodding. “In Paris itself, you could not buy these things so cheap.”
“I believe it,” Drucker said. Why that might be so never entered his mind. He took it for granted that Germany was entitled to first claim on whatever France produced. Germany, after all, was the beating heart of the Reich.
“Would you like me to do that up in gift-wrapping, sir?” the clerk asked.
“Yes, please.” Drucker hated wrapping presents himself. “Thank you very much. And put it in a plain bag afterwards, if you’d be so kind.” He left the shop well pleased with himself. The plate, which reproduced an eighteenth-century painting of a shaded grotto, would look splendid on the mantel, or perhaps mounted on the wall.
He didn’t bother heading back toward the Volkswagen, not yet. He knew he shopped more efficiently than Kathe and the children. Instead, he window-shopped as he wandered through the streets of Greifswald. He paused thoughtfully in front of a shop that stocked goods imported not from France but from Italy. A slow smile stole across his face. He went inside and made a purchase. He had that one gift-wrapped, too. The clerk, a pretty young woman, was most obliging. By the way she smiled, she might have been obliging if he’d been interested in something other than the shop’s stock in trade. But he had no great interest in anyone but Kathe, and so did not experiment.
When he went back to the car, he found the rest of the family there ahead of him, and had to endure their teasing all the way home. “You’ll get coal for Christmas, every one of you,” he growled in mock anger, “brown coal that won’t even burn without stinking and smoking.”
On Christmas morning, before sunup, he took his family outside. They looked toward the east, not toward Bethlehem but toward Peenemunde, about thirty kilometers away. To his disappointment, the fog lay too thick to let them see the latest A-45 ascend to the heavens, but the roar of the rocket reverberated inside their bones.
“Maybe you’ll ride it one of these days, Heinrich, Adolf,” he said.
His sons’ faces glowed with pride. Claudia said, “And what about me?” The best he could do to answer her was change the subject.
They went inside and opened presents, which provided plenty of distraction. Kathe exclaimed in delight at the plate from Limoges. She’d got Drucker a fancy meerschaum, and some Turkish tobacco to smoke in it. He puffed away in delight. Heinrich got a fancy one-liter beer stein. He proceeded to fill and then empty it, after which he got sleepy and red in the face.
“Maybe we should have bought the half-liter stein after all,” Drucker said. Kathe laughed. Heinrich looked offended and woozy at the same time.
Adolf got a battery-powered Leopard panzer with a control on the end of a long wire. He blitzkrieged through the living room and around the Christmas tree, t
ill he wrapped the wire around the tree and couldn’t undo things by reversing. Claudia squealed ecstatically when she opened her present, a blond plastic doll with a spectacular wardrobe and even more spectacular figure. That one hadn’t been cheap, since it was imported from the USA, but it made her so happy, Drucker judged it well worth the cost.
“All my friends will be jealous,” Claudia chortled, “especially Eva. She’s wanted one for weeks-practically forever.”
“Maybe she got one, too,” Drucker said. A little of Claudia’s joy evaporated; she hadn’t thought of that. But then, because it was Christmas, she brightened and made the best of it.
After a Christmas supper of fat roast goose, all her resentment went away, and, for the evening, all of Drucker’s, too. Heinrich went out to take Ilse to a party. Adolf kept destroying the Reich ’s enemies till bedtime, while Claudia played with the American doll.
