LI.VISIÓN CREDENCIALISTA DE LA EDUCACIÓN

husband of a woman so famous that all the officers, who must have been single, would have loved to try for her hand, but not one of them had succeeded, because it was I who had enchanted her. These officers had their heads full of notions of defending honor and blood, and were probably incapable of doing anything more than jumping on a woman in bed with their riding boots on, not realizing that in bed you needed love and playfulness. That was my way of doing it, a way I had discovered a long time before, at Paradise's, when I'd spread ox-eye daisies and cyclamen petals over the laps of naked girls and finally, two years ago, on the lap of this political-minded young German, this commander in the nursing corps, this high-ranking Party member. While she was being congratulated, no one could have imagined her the way I had seen her, naked on her back as I garnished her lap with green spruce, which perhaps for her was even a greater honor than when the mayor pressed both our hands through the red flag and said how sorry he was that we couldn't both fall in the struggle for the New Europe and the new National Socialist man. When she saw my smile and realized that I'd decided

to play the game I'd been condemned to play by the Bureau for Racial Purity, Lise picked up her glass and looked at me, and everyone fell silent, expecting a ceremony. I stood up, making myself taller, and we faced each other, holding our glasses in our fingers, and the officers watched us care-fully, as if this was some kind of interrogation, and Lise laughed the way she laughed when we were in bed together, when I'd be gallant in the French manner. We looked at each other as though we were both naked, and again that white film came over her eyes, the kind of look women get when they are ready to cast aside the last shred of inhibition and let themselves be treated any way that seems right at the moment, when a different world opens up, a world of love games and wantonness. She gave me a long, slow kiss in front of everyone, and I closed my eyes, and as we kissed, our champagne glasses tilted in our fingers and the wine slowly spilled onto the tablecloth, and all the guests were silent. After that, everyone seemed abashed and looked at me with respect and curiosity, realizing that German blood has a lot more fun with Slavic blood than it does with other German blood. So though I was still an alien, I became an alien everyone respected with a touch of envy or maybe even hatred. The women looked at me as if they were trying to imagine what sorts of things I might do in bed. They must have thought I was up to some rather special games, and maybe even rough behavior, because they sighed sweetly, looked up at the ceiling, and talked with me, even though I mixed up der, die, and das when I spoke. These women talked to me slowly in their atrocious German, articulating the way you would in a nursery school, and they loved my answers and found the mistakes I made in

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conversational German charming and funny, and besides it gave them a taste of the magic of the Slavic plains and birch trees and meadows. But all the soldiers from the Heereswaffe and the SS glared at me because they could see only too well that I had won the affections of the beautiful, blonde Lise, that she had chosen a beautiful, animal love over German honor and blood, and that there was nothing they could do about it, even though their chests were plastered with medals and decorations from the campaigns against Poland and France.

When we came back from our honeymoon to that small town above Dëcîn where I was a waiter, Lise wanted us to have children. But like any true Slav, I was a creature of moods. I could do anything in the emotion of the mo-ment, but when Lise told me to get ready because that night she was set to conceive the New Man, the founder of the New Europe, I felt exactly the way I had when the Reichsdoktor, acting on the Nuremberg Laws, asked me to bring him a bit of my sperm on a piece of white paper.

For a week she'd been playing Wagner on the record player, Lohengrin and Siegfried, and she'd already decided that if it was a boy she'd call it Siegfried Ditie, and all week long she'd walked around gazing at those scenes in relief along the covered walkways and colonnades. She would stand there in the late afternoons with German kings and em-perors and Teutonic heroes and demigods rising against the blue sky, while my only thought was how I would strew her lap with flowers and how we'd start by playing like little children, especially since our name was Ditie.

That evening Lise appeared in a long gown, her eyes full of duty and blood and honor, and she put her hand in

mine, babbled something in German, and rolled her eyes upward, as though all the denizens of the Teutonic heaven were gazing down on us from the ceiling, through the ceiling—all the Nibelungs, and even Wagner himself, whom Use invoked for help in becoming pregnant the way she wished, in harmony with the new Teutonic sense of honor, so that her womb would be graced by the New Man, who would establish and live in the New Order of the New Blood and the New Thinking and the New Honor.

When I heard all this, I felt everything that makes a man