"I haven't got much choice, have I?" Alicia asked bleakly.

"You have a choice in the way you live." Lise picked her words with great care. "You haven't got a choice about what youare, not any more. When you have children, you'll have a choice about telling them what they are."

"Why would I ever want to put anybody else through this?" Alicia said.

Were there any Jews left in the Reich who hadn't asked themselves that question at least once? Were there any who hadn't asked it a thousand times? Quietly, Lise answered, "Because if you don't, then the Nazis win. They say we don't deserve to live, we don't deserve to be here at all. And if you don't tell your children what they are, who they are, aren't you saying you think the Nazis were right all along?"

"Weren't they?" Pain filled Alicia's voice. "If they thought Jews were horrible, ifeverybody thought Jews were horrible, if nobody tried to stop the SS from doing what it did, maybe Jews-maybewe really were horrible. Maybe wedeserved what happened."

That was another thought that had probably crossed every surviving Jew's mind. People saw themselves, at least in part, in the mirror their neighbors held up to them. If the mirror showed a twisted image, wouldn't they start to believe that was the way they really seemed? How could they help it?

"Some people did try to stop the SS. Not enough, though, and most of them got killed. But I don't think anybody deserves to be killed for what he is," Lise said. "You can't help that. If youdo something bad enough, maybe you deserve to die. That's a whole different argument, though. For just trying to live, and to get along as best you can?" She shook her head. "No, sweetheart."

Her daughter looked haunted. That was fair enough, too. How many millions of ghosts crowded the Germanic Empire? Better, maybe, not to try to count them all. That way lay despair. Alicia said, "I sure hope you're right."

So do I,Lise thought.But how can I know? How can anybody know? One thing she did know was that she had to conceal her doubts from her daughter. She said, "Of course I am."

"What am I going to do?" Alicia said, more to herself than to Lise.

But Lise answered her, with forced briskness: "What are you going to do? Since you've finished your homework and your sisters haven't, you're going to take a bath. And make sure you rinse all the shampoo out of your hair and wash behind your ears. Sometimes you leave enough dirt to grow potatoes in."

"Potatoes." Alicia thought that was funny. She was a child; she couldn't stay gloomy for long. She went up the stairs singing, "I'm my own vegetable garden."

Lise envied her that ability to swing away from sadness so fast.I used to be able to do that, she thought.I wonder where it went. Wherever it went, it was gone for good now. She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She hardly ever drank when she wasn't with other people who were drinking, but today she made an exception.

When Heinrich came through the door a few minutes later, Alicia-who hadn't yet started getting rid of the potatoes-Francesca, and Roxane all swarmed downstairs to give him hugs and kisses. He needed a couple of minutes to wade through them and make his way into the kitchen. He hugged Lise and kissed her, then noticed the glass of schnapps on the counter near the sink. "Tough day?" he asked. Lise nodded. Her husband pointed to the glass. "Must have been. You don't usually do that. What happened?"

"Later." Lise nodded in the direction of the children.

"Oh." Heinrich nodded, too. He went to the cabinet for a glass of his own and also filled it full of schnapps. "Well, here's to us."

"To us," Lise agreed. They both drank. Their daughters wandered into the kitchen. Roxane wanted to help. Francesca wanted to tell her father about something that had happened at school. Lise couldn't tell what Alicia wanted-maybe just to remind herself that they were a family. Alicia kept eyeing her little sisters with an expression that said,I know something you don't know.

By what she'd said to Lise a little while before, she wished she didn't.

After a while, the girls went back upstairs. "Make sure you get clean," Lise reminded Roxane-she'd sometimes skip a bath if she saw the chance.

"Well?" Heinrich asked.

Lise sighed. In a low, weary voice, she said, "Alicia said she didn't want to be a Jew. She said maybe the Einsatzkommandos knew what they were doing when they got rid of us."

"Oh. Oh, hell." Heinrich reached for his glass of schnapps and gulped at it. The laugh that burst from him was an ugly sound, one that had nothing to do with mirth. "Well, God knows she's not the first one of us to feel that way."

"I understand that," Lise said. "But still…"

"Yes. But still." Another swig and her husband's glass was empty. He poured it down like that about as often as Lise drank alone. With another ugly laugh, he said, "Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an SS man when I was a little boy? Before I knew, I mean."

"No." Lise shook her head in astonishment. They'd been married almost fifteen years, but startling things still surfaced, like rocks working their way up through thin soil. "No, you never said a word about that."

"Well, I did. I thought the black uniform was the most wonderful thing in the world, and of course this wasn't too long after we beat the United States, so SS men were heroes in all the movies and televisor shows where Wehrmacht men weren't. When my father told me, I didn't want to believe him. For a long time after that-along time, I'm telling you-I thought we had it coming to us."

"You never said anything about that. Never," Lise said.

Instead of answering right away, Heinrich poured himself another glass of schnapps. His back was to her as he said, "It's not exactly something I'm proud of, you know."

"I think we all go through it," Lise said. "You sound like you had it worse than most of us, though."

"I probably did." Her husband shook his head, still not looking at her. "No, I certainly did. Even now, there are days when working at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht seems like a poor second best, and I ought to have the SS runes on my collar tabs."

"Could you have kept up the masquerade if you did?" Lise asked.

"Some people do," Heinrich said, and she nodded. He sighed. "I'm glad-most of me is glad-I didn't have to try, though. Do you want me to talk with Alicia? Is she all right?"

"Maybe don't push it too hard right now," Lise said after a little thought. "You know how, how-overwhelming it can be. I think she'll settle down. She just realized she'll alwaysknow what she is, no matter what she decides to do about it."

"Ah, yes," Heinrich said. "That's another moment we all have, sure enough. The curse of knowledge…"

"Alicia thinks it's a curse right now," Lise said.

"I don't know what to do about it." Heinrich set about emptying that second glass of schnapps. "I wish I did, but I don't think anybody who's…in our boat does."

"We ought to have the Stutzmans over again," Lise said. "Anna's been coping with it for more than a year now. Maybe she can help Alicia-and even if she can't, they can play together. And I was on the phone with Esther this afternoon, and she says Susanna's back from London with all sorts of wild stories."

"Sounds good to me," Heinrich said. "I'm going to have lunch with Walther in the Tiergarten tomorrow. I'll set something up then, and you can call Susanna."

"All right." Lise nodded. "What does Walther want to talk about?" She assumed he wanted to talk about something. People met in Berlin's greatest park to get out in the open air-and also to get away from the possibility of talking where microphones might overhear.

Her husband answered with a shrug. "Don't know yet. I'll find out."

"Fair enough," Lise said. "What's new at work?"