"We've come all the way to the zoo," Esther said in amazement. "Shall we go in and look at the animals?"

"No!" Susanna startled even herself with the force of her reaction. She had to stop and think to figure out why she felt the way she did. "I don't want to look at lions and elephants and ostriches in cages, not when I'm in a cage myself."

"Oh." Esther thought that over, too. After a little while, she said, "But people like the animals. Berliners have always liked animals." As if to prove her point, a man perhaps old enough to have served in the Second World War sat on a park bench scattering torn-up bits of bread for birds and squirrels.

"You're right, but I don't care." Susanna stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. That was the expression Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff had come to dread. "They're still trapped in there, and I don't want anything to do with them."

Esther didn't argue. She'd known Susanna long enough to know how impractical arguing with her could be. She just shrugged and said, "In that case, let's head back to your apartment."

"All right." Susanna was glad enough to turn around. She sighed. "I never thought I'd wish I were living in England."

"Why would you?" Esther asked. "Over there, they have their own people watching them, and they have us, too."

"But they have a party that's serious about turning over a new leaf," Susanna answered. "We don't. Oh, people say the new Fuhrer will be something different, but I'll believe it when I see it."

"I hope it's true," Esther said. "Maybe it'll mean easier times for…everybody." She chose the innocuous word because a man in a brown Party uniform came past them. He looked intent on his own business, but Susanna would have used an innocuous word anyplace where he could hear, too.

"Easier times," Susanna said wistfully. "I'll believe that when I see it, too, especially with what's going on now." She wished she hadn't said that as soon as she did; Esther looked on the point of tears. Susanna often talked first and worried about consequences later. When she was younger, she'd thought she would outgrow it. But it seemed to be a part of her. Sometimes that landed her in trouble. Sometimes it proved very valuable. Every so often, it managed both at once. She knew she had to repair the damage here, and did her best: "One way or another, everything will turn out all right."

"I hope so," Esther said, "but I'm sure I don't see how."

"As long as we act the way any other citizens of the Reich would if their rights were being violated, I think we'll do all right," Susanna said.

"If we were any other citizens of the Reich, our rights wouldn't be violated," Esther said. "Not like this, anyhow."

"Not like this, no," Susanna admitted. "But they still would be. That's what the Reich is all about: the government can do whatever it wants, and everybody else has to hold still for it. But people don't. Germans don't, anyway. If it bumps up against them, they bump back."

"Or they get bumped off," Esther said.

Susanna wished she hadn't put it like that, not because she was wrong but because she was right.Or they get bumped off. That had always been the Reich 's answer for everything-and, judging by the past seventy years, a very effective answer it was, too.

HEINRICH GIMPEL KISSED LISE, GRABBED HIS ATTACHE case, and headed out the door. It was a fine, bright summer morning, the sun already high in the sky. The orbiting weather platforms predicted that this heat wave would last for the rest of the week. A heat wave in Berlin would have been nothing in Algiers, or even in Rome, but it was better than the week of rain and mist that could come even in the middle of July.

Volkswagens and the occasional Mercedes zoomed past Heinrich as he stood at the corner and waited for the commuter bus. He'd never seen much point to owning a motorcar. To him, they were just swank, and more expensive than they were worth. With the buses and trains, you could get anywhere you needed to go.

As if to prove as much, the commuter bus pulled up a minute later. He got on, fed his account card into the slot, reclaimed it, and found a seat. A few stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He plopped himself down beside Heinrich with a grunted,"Guten Morgen."

"Guten Morgen,"Heinrich said."Wie geht's?"

"Well, I'll tell you, it could be better," Willi answered. "How's it going with you?"

"I'm doing all right." Heinrich couldn't tell Willi how worried he was about the Kleins. That would have required too much in the way of explanation. But he could sound sympathetic when he asked, "What now?"

Unlike him, Willi wasn't inclined to suffer in silence. When Willi felt wronged, the whole world heard about it. And so, all the way to the train station, Heinrich got a blow-by-blow account of his friend's latest tiff with his wife: who'd said what, who'd thrown what, and how Willi had had to sleep on the sofa in the front room. "Why is it," Willi asked, "that when you have a row with your woman, you're always the one who sleeps on the couch? She stays in bed and she stays comfortable. My back is killing me."

"I don't know. I never really thought about it," Heinrich said. Except when Lise was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their girls, the two of them had never slept apart.

"I never thought about it, either, not till this morning," Willi said. "Erika acts like it's a law of nature-she isn't happy, so I have to go somewhere else. You call that fair? Do you?"

The bus came up to Stahnsdorf's train station just then. Heinrich didn't need to answer, which was probably just as well. As far as he could remember, he'd never heard of a woman sleeping on the sofa while a man stayed in bed. It didn't seem fair. It wasn't anything he'd ever had to worry about himself, but it didn't.

In the station, he put fifteen pfennigs into a vending machine and pulled out a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter. Even in buying a newspaper, he fed the Party's coffers. Were he the good German he pretended to be, he supposed that would have made him feel proud, or at least patriotic. As things were, it left him mildly-perhaps a little more than mildly-irked. He couldn't even find out what was going on in the world without helping to finance his own destruction.

Willi put coins in the machine and got a paper, too. Along with the other people who'd ridden the bus to the station, they went to the platform to wait for the train to downtown Berlin. Heinrich glanced at his watch. They wouldn't have to wait long.

When the train pulled up a very few minutes later, the commuters fed their account cards into the slot one after another. Willi was in front of Heinrich in the queue. He sat down by a window, and thumped the seat next to him to show Heinrich was welcome. They both started reading the papers.

"Buckliger's going to talk to a bunch of big shots in Nuremberg tomorrow," Heinrich remarked. "I wonder what he'll have to say."

"Whatever the Bonzen want to hear," Willi predicted. "What other point is there in going to Nuremberg?" He spoke with a Berliner's cynicism and a Berliner's certainty that no other place in the Reich really mattered.

"Maybe," Heinrich said. "But maybe not, too. He didn't say what everybody expected him to the last time, you know."

He waited to see what Willi would make of that. Willi started to tell him he didn't know what he was talking about-started to and then, very visibly, stopped. "That's true," his friend said. "He didn't. But why would you go to Nuremberg to say anything that's out of the ordinary? Out of the ordinary isn't what Nuremberg is for."

"Who knows?" Heinrich shrugged. "If we're confused after he makes his speech, Horst will tell us what to think about it."

"Well, of course he will," Willi Dorsch said, with no irony Heinrich could hear. "Telling us what to think is what Horst Witzleben is for."