Wilhelm started to protest, and she held up a hand. “I am tired. Do not argue. Your father left you a locked metal box containing something so secret that I was never to open it. It was to be yours after you finished university.”
After his father died, she continued, her voice hoarse from medicines and faint from weakness, she opened it anyway. If they were no longer German, why did she have to be an obedient German wife? And that went for Wilhelm too. His wonderful brother had died for no reason, had been made to fight when just a boy, and since she had come here she had taught herself to read English, and she watched American shows, and she learned of how the Jews had been slaughtered in the camps, and none of it was what she believed Germany was, and certainly not one that anyone with an ounce of religion in them should have stood for. She even revealed, as she lay there, withered, her hair white, with two pink spots from anger on her cheeks, that her sister had hidden a Jew in the attic, and no one ever found out, and now she was ashamed that she had not had the courage to do the same.
Wilhelm became angry at his mother then, and said that she was lying, that their father would have been ashamed of her, and that his brother had died for the Führer, and that he had promised to live for the Fatherland and knew of others who wanted to bring it back.
She threw her glass of water at him and said, “Get out!”
He had. He never saw her alive again. Now he regretted that, since he had so much to ask her, but she died a few days later. He didn’t even know, for instance, if she knew that she now lived in a world that believed that the past, beginning in April 1945, was different, and that the change had occurred the day his father supposedly had died. But he never could have asked her directly if she had been raped by an American soldier rather than a Russian.
He had opened the box as soon as she died, and found strange papers he did not understand, but he had known they were related to the melted-looking electronic object, because a photograph of it was paper-clipped to the notes. He still kept the object with him in his Washington condominium as one of his most cherished treasures. He thought that this was why he could see two pasts, and he was pretty sure that Jill Dance could too, because her mother’s name before she was married—Bette Elegante—was in a list he found in the box, along with many other names. He had tracked down some of those people. They were spies, every last one of them, he was sure. Not one of them revealed anything to him.
He knew now that the notes were about a Device that could change time, if only because, for a moment, he had seen another epoch taking place, one in which, after Kennedy’s death, the Russians and Americans might have annihilated each other and Germany would have been able to rise again. And yet, he remembered the other Germany, divided, as if it were a piece of fabric to be torn in half by housewives arguing at the market. Here, it had never been divided. No one but himself seemed to know that. Even the books had changed, overnight, it seemed. Everything had changed but him, and he was certain it was because of that glowing thing.
There was something else too, in those notes—nonsense about it being able to change the human mind, to end war, but he discarded that. His own short war in Berlin had been glorious, a mad chaos of resistance, a brave last stand, and he had avenged his brother’s death. That felt good, not bad. It was the one good thing he had ever done.
Over the years, under the tutelage of a friend, he migrated to D.C., joined the Foreign Service, and found that any information about his father was sealed for all time. He learned a little science, wondered more and more about the strange sounds and the light in the piece of junk, the coincidence of his father dying the same day he heard the television say—he was still sure of it—that President Kennedy had been shot. He also stubbornly changed his first name, legally, back to Wilhelm. Why should he be ashamed of it? He didn’t go so far, though, as to change Anderson back to Konrad.
At various times in his twenties, he had belonged to several clandestine organizations. One was a simple, straightforward, Hitler-worship club. Wilhelm had seen the man; his brother had touched him, so Wilhelm was a minor star. What magnificent power Hitler had, and that same deep, sacrificial love for Germany. He kept a small replica of the 1940 German flag on his desk, next to his Q station, hanging from a cheap plastic stand, and he had a real
Arbeiterjugend
pennant, which the Hitler Youth had used in the 1930s, given him as a gift, framed. He never allowed anyone in his study, and always kept it locked.
He had also, long ago, belonged to groups that believed that a Nazi future was still possible. He had resigned from those groups years ago and had completely expunged his name and records from any of their accounts—not because he no longer believed in National Socialism, or in white supremacy. He did so because, otherwise, he could not have the job he had now. His present job was an avenue to power.
He watched the back of Jill’s neck as she read—long, with tendrils of her carelessly swept-up hair curling down against the tan skin he sometimes wished to caress.
He was not that much older than she was—twelve years. They had so much in common. He had contrived to take courses with her, attended the same workshops, yet she seemed to hardly notice him. Which was proper; she was married. But beyond that was a strange reserve he imagined was feigned. She must feel the same as him, that they were fated to be together, eventually. Now, she was getting a divorce—more evidence that his dream of marrying her was true. She knew more than she said. She had some connection with that light-thing.
And he knew more about it than she could possibly imagine. He wanted to share that knowledge with her. Together, they could change the world. Her strange liberal ideas had to be a cover. She had to be more intelligent than that.
The fuller plans for it, possibly, were in the house she lived in now. Together, they could pool what they knew, bring about a new future.
No, it was not coincidence that he worked with her. It was fate. He probably would not have made that connection unless fate had led him here, to the Bank, to this very section of the Bank.
It was true that her ideas were tragically skewed. He could see that. Yet, he knew that he could fix her. Repair what had gone wrong. She was working on plans that directly opposed everything he believed. Those wonder-schools that supposedly would teach everyone to read. Nonsense, desecration. Some people—some races, and this was a scientific fact—were dumb as dirt. The Chinese, African, Japanese, Jewish, and Indian people he met at the Bank were anomalies.
He couldn’t blame everyone else for agreeing with her—they had been indoctrinated since birth to believe that all races were equal, that everyone deserved equal rights. He even caught himself thinking this, sometimes, because he had undergone the same indoctrination—but, happily, too late. He knew how he was supposed to think, and he had to seem to think these things right down to his core. He couldn’t let himself get so stirred up like this. It was just that Jill was so—so innocent, so goody-goody, so seemingly unaware that one day you could get up in the morning in an intact, ancient capital city and by night your city could be a pile of rubble filled with bloody, stinking corpses, one of them your brother. He had a “friend” who was Russian, part of another plan he was working on. He knew how useful people could be, how to cultivate them. He’d managed to stay out of the clutches of mental health people; he knew how to lie on an application, on the batteries of personality tests he’d undergone. He had a mission given to him when he was five, by Hitler himself, and by his brother, the day before he died.
Women were drawn to him. He was quite good-looking, and debonair. At first, this made him happy, but inevitably, relationships deepened. One fiancée had recommended therapy, evaluation, drugs, and the next one did too, after a year, and in much stronger terms, wondering aloud if he might be schizophrenic, or worse. It was better, he had decided, and easier, to live alone than to have a relationship with someone to whom he might reveal his most intimate thoughts, and who might then turn on him, even before they knew the whole truth, only distant fragments. He dated sporadically, picked up women in bars, satisfied his needs without ever getting involved.
Which made Jill’s aloof behavior somewhat puzzling, almost insulting. He kept in shape; his hair was still a nice shade of blond, though paling a bit—maybe he should think about some color. He had a doctorate. He was a smart man. He made good money. He had a nice condo, played the piano quite well, had a subscription to the Kennedy Center, and went to all the operas.
Jill finished eating. She dropped her book into the heavy bag she always carted around, hoisted the bag to her shoulder, and picked up her tray. He stood, leaving his own tray on the table, and hurried around a dozen tables to intercept her. “Let me help you with that.”
She held on to the tray with both hands—rather tightly, so there was a short battle before he let go—and laughed. “Bill, thank you, but I’m completely capable of disposing of my own trash.” She did so.
He stayed close, hoping to ride the elevator up with her, but she said, “See you later,” and ducked into a bathroom.
Jill
THE NEW SCHOOLS
May 29
J
ILL ENTERED THE CONFERENCE ROOM
on her floor. She pulled out a chair at the end of the long, gleaming hardwood table and linked her Q presentation to the projector.
Soon the participants began to show up.
Clarissa, skeleton thin, wore her trademark arm bangles, dangling earrings, and a tight, plain black business dress and jacket. She nodded to Jill and took a seat next to the Nepalese woman they had brought to Washington. Clarissa had been most vocal, within the Bank, about trying to stop Jill’s project. Jill had discovered that while she had been in the hospital, Clarissa had worked hard to weaken the project. She was still trying, mostly in covert ways, like slowing down the loan process. But Jill now had the power to add more loan processors.
At the last meeting, before Jill had gone into the hospital, she had said, “Local populations will regard these schools as propaganda tools.” This was only one of her many objections, most of which Jill found useful in strengthening her own position.
“Some people will,” Jill had responded. “Even though communities have to request the schools, not every community is a democracy. Let’s discuss possible strategies to deal with that and enable children to attend.” Those strategies were now incorporated into the vast documentation that all such projects amassed.
There was no question, now. This would be an almost celebratory meeting. The Children’s Houses were green-lighted, with the Bank’s full support. The United Nations, in their most recent Convention on the Rights of the Child, had included an International Right of Every Child to Literacy. Classbooks and libraries accessible via Q, after one learned to read, contained a world of information—science, literature, anything ever in print. Although licensing fees and payments to content providers were expensive, those fees, and all fees, no matter what was accessed, were presently funded via huge philanthropic institutions. In this world—
this world,
Jill thought, so slightly, yet so potently different from
that world,
her old world, keeping a child illiterate was almost universally regarded as child abuse. Increasingly, technology was available and in development that would cheaply and easily diagnose reading disabilities, and these technologies were embedded in classbooks. If a child was having difficulty, Q diagnosed it and brought forth a new strategy.
The main thing that classbooks could not do was provide the concrete materials that young children needed to manipulate in order to move information about the physical world into their developing minds. Hence, the Children’s Houses, with their full array of materials.
Clarissa had lately sent a paper to everyone on the committee implicating the questionable content of many of their supporters’ movies and games in promoting violent behavior because of mirror neurons, recently discovered.
Jill had been pleased. It may have offended or cooled some of their supporters, but it probably made some of them reexamine what they were doing. And it certainly hadn’t quelled any of their support. All the research in the mirror neuron paper was solid; it was true, and simply strengthened the scientific underpinnings of the venture. Part of the outstanding success of Montessori was attributable to the activation of mirror neurons; their function in learning was a vital component in the school’s pedagogy. Holographic children manifesting local race, language, and culture activated whenever a child touched a particular material, showing each child, nonverbally, how the exercise was done. They could not always count on having a trained teacher in the environment, but the directress had always been only a small, but cohering, part of a successful classroom. A new child in a mature classroom always saw the wide variety of what the other children were doing, independently, and imitated them. The holographic children provided this link in a school that might be full, in a single day, of children ranging in age from two-and-a-half to five, with no teacher. The school might have a few module-trained aides who were also learning about the materials, child development, and conflict resolution strategies. The most important thing the first children to encounter the environment had to learn was respect for the materials, and for each other. Clarissa’s objection made a very good teaching point.
The room was filling up. Hank, a middle-aged man with a jolly laugh that belied his critical eye and attention to the bottom line, hurried into the room. Jill greeted her international team—two Montessori experts she’d flown in, one from Holland and one from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The engineer-architect team from China, the computer engineers specializing in virtual environments from Los Angeles, and an Indian physician from the World Health Organization also arrived. Her boss, Farid Lahaoud, who was Lebanese, schmoozed and smiled.