After an almost tearful appeal to buy war bonds, the newsman finally went away. The radio started playing music again. That was a relief. Music was-mostly-harmless. But you never heard jazz any more. The government said it was degenerate, like modern art. If the government didn't like it, Sarah thought she should.
She was working on an essay on Goethe-Munster's Jewish school naturally taught the German poets-when the front door opened. She put down her pen and dashed downstairs.
One glance at her father's face, and her brother's, told her everything she needed to know. "They wouldn't take you?" she blurted.
"Bastards!" Saul seemed ready to kick something that wasn't a football.
He towered over Father, who looked more sad than angry. "I had my discharge papers. I had my medal. I had my wound certificate. I had a letter from Max Lambert, who was my captain during the war. I had everything," he said. "And we went into Wehrkreis headquarters, and they wouldn't let us joint the Wehrmacht."
"Bastards!" Saul said again.
Wehrkreis-Military District VI-was centered on Munster. It drew in recruits from all over Westphalia and from western Hanover. But it didn't want a couple of Jews, even if one was a veteran and the other a fine physical specimen.
Sarah's mother came out of the kitchen. "What did they tell you?" she asked.
"They told us no, that's what. There's a law, it seems, from 1935, that says Jews can't join up," Samuel Goldman answered. One corner of his mouth curled up in a wry smile. "Even so, I don't think they expected to see us sticking our heads into the lion's mouth."
"We didn't," Saul said. "If we'd tried to join the SS, now…"
In spite of five years of ever harder times, in spite of a day of crushing disappointment, Father started to laugh. When he did, the rest of the Goldmans did, too. He lit a cigarette. German tobacco smelled nastier than it had a couple of years before. Sarah didn't smoke, but Father said it tasted worse, too. Fewer imports…
Father blew out a gray cloud. "In fact, I'm sure they didn't expect anyone like us," he said.
"Why are you so sure?" Mother asked, as she was supposed to.
"Why? I'll tell you why." Samuel Goldman's mouth quirked again, but this time it was more grimace than smile. "Because the Feldwebel we talked to wasn't even mean to us. He just said it was impossible, and he kept on saying it, and he finally went and got a captain who said the same thing. The captain was polite, too-turns out he knows Max. If they had orders about how to deal with Jews trying to volunteer, they would have screamed at us and called us filthy Jewish pigdogs and maybe said we'd just volunteered to clean toilets-"
"With our tongues," Saul broke in.
"That's disgusting!" Sarah exclaimed.
"That's why they do it," her brother said, and then, "Bastards!" again.
"Anyhow, they looked at my papers. I showed them my scar," Samuel Goldman said. "I showed them the letter. I showed them the Iron Cross, but it was only Second Class, not First." He shrugged. "I was a corporal. Almost impossible for an enlisted man to get an Iron Cross, First Class, in the last war."
"The Fuhrer did," Sarah said. He was proud of it, too. He wore it on his left breast pocket all the time.
Father sighed. "I know. But he was one of a handful. The Feldwebel told me to be sure to hang on to the papers. 'You can't wear the uniform again,' he said, 'but that stuff may save your bacon anyway.' Then he laughed like a loon, because he thought saving a Jew's bacon was funny."
"What do you think he meant?" Sarah asked.
"Well, things aren't as bad for us because I'm a veteran," Father answered. "Even the Nazis respect that some. Not enough, but some."
"I can't say I'm really sorry they did turn you down," Mother said. "Now I won't have to worry about the two of you off at the ends of the earth with nasty people shooting at you."
Father only sighed. "Plenty of things closer to home to worry about. Where are we going to find money? What will they do to us? We should have got out before the war started. Too late now. One of the things I thought was-" He broke off.
"What?" Sarah asked it before Mother could. Or, more likely, Mother already knew.
Samuel Goldman looked at her. "If your brother and I-or even one of us-got into the Wehrmacht, nobody could say we weren't proper Germans. Nobody would do anything to the family because we weren't proper Germans, either." He gave Mother an ironic nod. "We might have been safer at the front than here in Munster, you know."
Mother's mouth twisted. "Don't talk about such things."
"Why not? It's not as if talking about them makes them come true." But then Father was the one who looked as if he'd bitten down on a lemon. Hitler had spent years talking about all the things he wanted to do to Jews. He talked about them, and talked about them, and talked about them-and the more he talked, the more of them did come true.
That was why Father didn't teach Roman history at the university any more. Jews were forbidden from holding academic positions. Father still made some money writing articles for the monumental Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopadie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft: basically, a multivolume encyclopedia of everything that was known about ancient Greece and Rome, up to the sixth century A.D. Samuel Goldman wasn't the only displaced Jewish professor putting cash in his pocket and bread on his table that way. If you had an Aryan academic friend who would steer things your way-who would, sometimes, put his name on what you'd written…You wouldn't get rich, but you might get by.
Editors paid by the page, too. Jewish scholars had written some monumental articles because of that. Scholars of the next generation would have a hard time finding anything more to say about quite a few topics.
If, of course, the next generation cared a pfennig's worth about classical antiquity. Maybe all the Aryan scholars would study Goths and Vandals and Vikings instead of Greeks and Romans. But even then, Sarah knew, Pauly-Wissowa would help.
If anything helped, anyway… FROM CALAIS, ALISTAIR WALSH COULD look across the Channel and see the white cliffs of Dover smudging the northeastern horizon. He'd been in France before, in 1918. He'd been a private then, an unhappy conscript. But he'd discovered he liked soldiering, even if getting shot in the leg meant he spent Armistice Day flat on his back in a military hospital.
So here he was again, this time with the three stripes and crown of a staff sergeant on his sleeve. He'd come as far as he was likely to. They wouldn't make him an officer even if the sky fell. He'd got what little education he owned in the army, and he had a buzzing Welsh accent.
Still, staff sergeant wasn't bad. It beat the hell out of a lifetime in a factory or a coal mine, which he would have had if he hadn't stayed a soldier. He could break in new men. And he could talk back to lieutenants, a lot of whom weren't much more than half his age.
He also had the pleasure of the company of his own kind. The British army would have come to pieces without its senior sergeants, and was smart enough to know it. Lying right across the Channel from Blighty, Calais had a better notion of what made a proper pub than most foreign places. In fact, the fellow who ran the Green Duck was an Englishman. He'd got wounded during the war, too, and ended up marrying his pretty French nurse and staying behind here.
Since the British Expeditionary Force crossed, the Green Duck had become the unofficial headquarters for people like Alistair: men who'd been through the mill, who wanted a place where they could get a pint or three and sit around and drink them and have a smoke without getting bothered by officers or yapping soldiers. If they thought they knew more about what was going on than the General Staff did…well, sergeants have had such thoughts since the days of Caesar, if not since those of Hammurabi.