And, as Trudy has expected, she buys the excuse.
Forgive me, she says, hopping off Trudy's desk. I forgot. But maybe, when things settle down with her… Will you at least think about it?
Of course, Trudy lies.
Ruth goes to the door.
Good, she says. Because I'm going to keep after you.
She cocks a thumb and forefinger at Trudy in imitation of shooting a gun. You know where to find me if you change your mind, she adds, and leaves.
Congratulations again, Trudy calls to Ruth's departing footsteps in the hall. They are rapid. Ruth does everything quickly.
Trudy smiles, then glances at her watch. She swears and leaps from her chair, tugs her still-damp boots on, and grabs her briefcase. Yanking the door open, she nearly collides with the student who is standing on the other side of it, head hanging.
Professor Swenson? the girl mumbles to the carpet between her feet. Can I talk to you a minute? I'm so so so so sorry I missed class yesterday, I had this really really really bad urinary tract infection…
11
DESPITE TRUDY'S TENURED POSITION, HER AFTERNOON seminar, Women's Roles in Nazi Germany, is in the basement, the bowels of the university's History Department. At the beginning of her course, Trudy routinely refers to the classroom as the Bunker-Hi, folks, and welcome to our lovely Bunker!-trying to alleviate first-day awkwardness and take the temperature of her new class. If it is a nice humorous batch, the quip earns a few smiles, even muted chuckles. More often, though, the students just sit stone-faced, extravagantly unimpressed by this feeble attempt to win them over. Trudy supposes she can't blame them. There really is not much to laugh about in the prospect of spending an entire semester in a cramped windowless room, beneath light grids that resemble old-fashioned ice-cube trays, in little orange chairs better suited to midgets than the average undergrad.
Truth be told, however, Trudy likes her classroom: the safety of being underground, the warmth of all those bodies packed together. This is her domain, where for fifty minutes three times a week she is in complete control. Where history is documented and footnoted, confined to text. Comprehensible, if only in retrospect.
As she does at the start of each class, she snaps a fresh stick of chalk in two and stands rubbing her thumb over the rough edge, surveying her captive audience. It is a chocolate box of personalities; at this stage in the semester, Trudy knows each student, if not by name, then by trait. The quiet girl who arrives early and does crossword puzzles with obsessive zeal. The brilliant sophomore with the cobweb tattooed on her face. The two boys-Frick and Frack-who always sit poised for escape near the door, as identical in movement as twins though they are not related; if one is sick or absent, the other is also.
How are you all today? Trudy asks.
She waits with her eyebrows significantly raised until she gets a few incomprehensible responses. This is typical. The class runs at four o'clock, a bad time, the doldrums. Her pupils are sluggish, their circadian rhythms demanding naps, their stomachs requiring dinner. They blink at their feet, owlish and surly; they slouch in their chairs, doodling in their notebooks-flowers, hearts, intricate geometric configurations-drawings that, as far as Trudy can make out, have nothing to do with the material at hand. At the moment, her eyes grainy from lack of sleep and her difficult drive, Trudy wants nothing more than to join them. Especially as today's subject, a survey of German women as to what they did during the war, hits a bit close to home.
Yet somebody has to be the teacher here, so Trudy glances down at her notes and lectures as animatedly as she is able. She talks, pauses, asks whether there are any questions, applies her squeaking chalk to the board, but all the while she feels a growing humidity beneath her turtleneck. Flop sweat. Every professor is prone to it, gives an ill-received lesson on occasion, and Trudy, no exception, knows there is no shame in it. But each time it happens inspires the same panic as the first.
She pushes her damp bangs from her forehead and looks at her watch, which she has unstrapped and set on the lectern. Only ten minutes left, thank God.
Trudy bounces the chalk in her palm. So in the final analysis, she says, what did you take from today's reading? What point, if any, is the author trying to make about the way these particular German women acted during the war?
Silence.
Trudy frowns out at her students. Once they get going they are usually a talkative group, flirtatious even, which makes their apathy today all the more galling. Perhaps it is not her fault; perhaps they have fallen prey to Thanksgiving Syndrome, too much sleep and food at home, dread of upcoming exams. Trudy decides to prod them a little.
Come on, people, she says. Participation is part of your grade, you know… What did you think of Frau Heidenreich saying that the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves? Were you surprised that she still thinks this, even today?
Silence.
Is her attitude typical?
Silence.
Did anybody do the assigned reading?
Silence. Then, from the rear, a phlegmy yawn that sounds like a marble rattling in a vacuum cleaner hose.
Ms. Meyerson, Trudy says. If you must insult me in this fashion, please cover your mouth. I am tired of seeing your tonsils.
Some titters from the class. So they are awake, Trudy thinks.
Sorry, the offending student mutters. It's just that-
Just that what?
Of course the anti-Semite was typical, the student says, scowling ferociously at her notebook. All those women were anti-Semitic. They were, like, part of the whole war machine. They were the perps.
Excuse me?
The perpetrators.
Ah, says Trudy. So, German women were perpetrators. And you know something? I agree with you, to a degree. Many of them were. But was it entirely their fault? Were they not products of their culture-which as we've seen was rabidly anti-Semitic-as much as you or I are? Might they not have been forced into doing what they did by the war? Don't desperate times call for desperate measures?
Silence. A bead of sweat trickles down Trudy's ribcage.
All right, she says, walking out from behind her lectern to stand in front of the class. Let's try it this way. Let's make it personal. Let's say… you're an Aryan German woman, circa 1940, 1941. About the age most of you are-twenty, twenty-one. Your normal life has been rudely interrupted by the war. Your husband is off fighting for the Vaterland, or already dead. Perhaps you have a small child to care for. And suddenly the Jews in your community start disappearing. Maybe you see it happening, maybe-as many of these women claimed-you don't. But you hear the rumors. You gossip, as women do. You know. And you know too that the price of resistance, or helping Jews-hiding them, feeding them, whatever-is death. What do you do?
Now they are listening.
The right thing, somebody calls.
Which is?
Well, duh. Helping the Jews, obviously. Any way you can.
Oh, come on, scoffs another student. That's, like, so naive. It sounds good, but like you'd really help if you knew you'd die for it. But not just, like, die. Be tortured first. And they'd kill your kid too.
I'd still do it, insists the first.
No, you just think you would, argues the second. It's easy to say you'd do something when you're just, like, sitting here in your chair.
You see? Trudy interjects. It's not so simple, is it? Most of us are drawn to this time period thinking it was a war of absolute good versus absolute evil-qualities rarely found in their purest form-and that's true. But don't forget that history isn't just a study in black and white. Human behavior is comprised of ulterior motives, of gray shades.