The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  With a month’s rent owing and the landlord bellowing, the Hecks were forced to move again. If it hadn’t been winter, Heini would have chosen the park rather than their new home. It was a corner of a basement, no window, and the worst room by far in a long sequence of bad rooms. The bricks were mouldy and damp, the stove gobbled coal and swallowed heat, the air wasn’t fit for breathing;even the rats, Heini noticed, stayed away. And if the room was not bad enough, Walter’s lungs were playing up, the drink was turning Greta’s feet numb, and his sister, after falling prey to one of Greta’s boyfriends, was not good for anything. They had always managed before, but now it was difficult to see anyone who was worse off.

  With thieving proving unprofitable and his years of school not yielding the cash Heini had hoped, his life was an unremitting burden. For the first time ever he was desperate to escape. He had heard there was work to be found on farms, so he decided to try the countryside – although having never before ventured more than a couple of kilometres from Alexanderplatz, he could not have described a farm, much less the type of work he expected to find. But life was so miserable he simply didn’t care.

  He planned to slip out early one Friday before anyone was awake, but the morning was clogged with problems. There was his brother’s cough to attend to, and his mother’s feet were so bad she needed help to the bar. So instead of being out on the open road, he was lugging her down the street, her numb feet buckling beneath her, a barrel-shaped woman above her spindly legs, and no lightweight that’s for sure. At last he gets her settled and returns home for his pack and there’s his sister swearing she’s seen the man who hurt her. She’s clinging to him and crying and Heini knows if anyone can hold him here it’s Hilde. Yet he has a premonition that if he doesn’t leave now he’ll never get away. Though his stomach churns for her, he tenses against the turmoil and calms her down, and as her grip loosens, he moves to leave. Immediately her body is pinning him back, and again he feeds her soothing words. But this time when her hold begins to weaken he makes sure he is prepared. He promises her a special treat.

  He knows his sister, she’s young and easily tempted. What treat? she asks. He tells her it’s a surprise, that if she lets him go she’ll soon find out. A minute later he is alone in the street and if he has any sense he’ll make a run for it. But it’s his sister and he has made a promise. It takes him almost an hour but eventually he tracks down a large, fragrant orange and returns to the room. Hilde is delighted. He sits on the bed with her and Walter and removes the peel slowly and delicately so as not to pierce the transparent skin, all the while telling about lands where oranges are so plentiful people can pick them from trees whenever the fancy takes them. With the peeling finished, he separates the segments. One for you, he says, handing a piece to his sister, one for you, he says to his brother, and one for me, and soon everyone is sucking a segment of orange. Then the process is repeated, and after that one more time.

  ‘What happens if there are the wrong number of pieces?’ Hilde asks.

  ‘But that’s the magic of oranges,’ says Heini. ‘There’s always exactly the right number.’

  With the orange finished and his sister calm and happy, Heini finally leaves. There are no goodbyes, he doesn’t want to make it harder for himself, instead he trains his thoughts to the future. He’ll find work and make enough money to send for Hilde and Walter, and the three of them will live together in a nice room in the country with a stove which works and sufficient food never to be hungry. The thoughts give him courage as he travels westwards, moving quickly through the familiar streets and into the broad strip of Unter den Linden. He crosses over Friedrichstrasse, he’s practically running he’s moving so fast, but any slower and he might change his mind. His pace slackens only after he passes through the Brandenburg Gate and, for the first time in his life, he enters the Tiergarten.

  It’s another world in here. The air is as fresh as rainwater and the light looks like it has been washed in gold. Even the sound is different, with muffled rustlings of birds and trees and the burr of distant traffic. The clunk and grate of his boots is thunderous, and he tries to tread more lightly. He’s surprised at so many smart people with nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon than stroll beneath the trees and talk. He feels the scratch of their gaze and a prickling of heat down his back. He smoothes his hair and settles his jacket, but still they stare at him. A minute or two later he can’t bear it any longer and takes the next path out of the park to the road.

  It is late morning and not knowing how far he has to travel he sets himself a pace. With winter just around the corner the day is surprisingly warm. He stops at a fountain to drink, then he is off again and striding it out. In these bustling streets no one takes any notice of him and Heini far prefers it that way. He keeps his gaze to the ground, skirts the lumps and pits in the pavement, the garbage too, and expert scavenger that he is, easily sees the tiny coin even though it’s coated with grime. It is not German money and useless to anyone with an empty stomach. He wipes it on his sleeve and studies the engraving. It’s English, he thinks, and judging by the size not worth much, but still he folds it in a shred of paper and puts it in his pocket. It’s an omen, he decides, to bring him luck in his new life.

  He walks onwards until he reaches the district of Charlottenburg. It is such a short way from home but it might be another country; it makes him think he wouldn’t feel right in heaven if there turned out to be such a place. He stops in a quiet clean street lined with pale, palatial buildings. His boots are gross on grass that looks like it has just been to the barbers, and through the silence he hears a frantic panting – his own, he suddenly realises. He feels the danger creep down his spine; it’s like being caught with your hand in a lady’s purse. He raises his head, and his nostrils flare to the possibility of another life, but if there is a scent he fails to pick it up.

  He has been away from home for just over an hour, yet knows this is not for him. He longs for the safety of noise and jostling crowds, he longs for the familiar smell of his own life. He recalls all he has heard of the country, the broad open fields and tranquil lakes and how you can walk for a whole day and not see a single person, and he imagines himself alone in the middle of a vast empty silent landscape buffeted by the same terror filling him now. But still he does not move. It is not until he sees a Kinderfraülein with two young children in her care that he turns back – not out of love for his family, in his short life love has never been sufficient reason to do anything, but someone has to look after them.

  • • •

  When Greta’s next boyfriend arrived, a box of possessions in one hand, a flagon in the other and the usual empty pockets, Heini took a stand: he paid for the room, so he should decide who could stay. He made it clear that while his mother was welcome, her boyfriend was not. Greta packed her things and left, but returned within the week. With the arrival of the next man she left again, for a month this time. With the third man, when she had not come home after five weeks, Heini set out to find her.

  Greta was neither happy nor unhappy to see him. She asked after Walter and Hilde, and before returning to her drink and her loser, muttered that Heini knew where she was should he need anything. The following week Heini found a better room. He pulled his mother out of the bar, sobered her up and dragged her off to the landlord because no one would rent a room to a fifteen year old with two children to support. It was one of the few services she had ever done for him, and, as it turned out, the last.

  It was easier with only three: Heini, Hilde and Walter, attached to one another like fingers to a hand. Heini knew he would die for his sister or brother – no boast this, just never put to the test. Hilde’s fears kept her indoors. It was not the one man who hurt her that filled her with terror, it was all men. She stayed home while the boys went in search of a living. Walter made a poor house thief, and was not much better as a bag snatcher;but as the twenties progressed and more goods and produce became available, he proved a champ at shopping. The thi
ngs he paid for and the things he didn’t meant they scraped by. Heini took whatever reading and writing jobs came his way, but with more children going to school he knew there was little future in it. As for thieving, if he had a cart he might have tried the large houses near the Tiergarten, he may even have ventured as far as those places he’d seen in Charlottenburg, but he had no cart, not even the possibility of one. As for bicycles, he’d never had any luck with them: as quickly as he stole one so it would be stolen from him. And with the roads such a mess and many of the streetcar tracks running on planks because of the new underground construction, even streetcars were no longer fast or reliable.That left only his feet.

  The old rooming houses, like those the Hecks had always lived in, had never been worth a thief ’s attention, so Heini concentrated, as he had always done, on those buildings in neighbouring districts where access was easy, locks were limp, and valuables, if not thick on the ground, sufficient to make the risk worthwhile. In short, he robbed the flats of the nearly poor. He robbed the coalman and the clerk, he robbed the streetcar driver and the leather dyer. He robbed people who could not afford to lose a pfennig. But what choice did he have? He might prefer to rob the rich of their wallets and handbags, but in the long aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, the rich were in short supply and pickpockets as numerous as flies.

  Month by month the pickings were ever more slender. As a last resort Heini decided to try the huge new apartment blocks which were springing up in the district. These buildings, erected for people much like himself, were just a fancier type of slum and he had previously avoided them. He had watched when the bulldozers moved in, watched as they destroyed everything – shops, stalls, corners for talking, benches for loitering, eaves for smoking under, watched as a good chunk of daily life disappeared. These buildings held few attractions for the thief but now it seemed he had little choice.

  One morning while he was enjoying a quiet smoke just a couple of streets from one of the new apartment blocks and thinking that as soon as he was finished he would wander over and try his luck, a huge explosion occurred, rocketing smoke and debris high into the sky. And following the first explosion, smaller aftershocks. There was a long pause between the roar of the explosions and people rushing into the streets, a quiet, queer moment like the world had just stopped and was not yet ready to begin again. When the shouting began, Heini joined the throng running towards the new building. It was all smoke and ruin when they arrived. A huge gas explosion had ripped the guts out of the place, ripped the guts out of the inhabitants too. Heini had been a cigarette away from death, and as he walked away he wondered how much luck he had left.

  Prospects

  Since his earliest years, Heini had known that the essence of satisfaction was living the right-sized life. And while it didn’t take much nous to realise that where poverty reigns, the right-sized life is very small indeed, you have to make a go of it. He knew this all the way down to his fingertips, but for reasons he couldn’t explain, the knowledge started to slip. He became aware of a growing unease, a bit like two rusty cogs grinding inside him. It was on the day he first met the Jewish pastry-cook he realised that what he was feeling was none other than wanting more – more than was possible.

  It was a bleak, dirty day, and he was tired and hungry. Hilde hadn’t left the room all week and Walter was coughing and spluttering and too sick to work. There was little food around and the small change in his pocket so small it wouldn’t yield half a cabbage. Three mouths to feed and neither food nor money, and he was tired of it all. He was sixteen years old, the sort of lad who in different circumstances might have made a mother proud, strong and solid with a crop of blond wavy hair, rather like a lion in appearance, so he had been told. Sixteen years old, yet all out of energy. He couldn’t have said exactly what he needed, but it wasn’t this filth, this gutter, this room, this hunger, this cough. And it wasn’t the winter cold, the howling pipes, the savage itch of his skin, and his bloody teeth which wouldn’t fall out, just clung to their boiling abscesses until he begged the barber to pull. He would see people sashaying through the streets or riding in cabs, their stomachs full, their teeth good, he would watch these people and be prepared to make any bargain to be them – not forever, just while he regained his energy and found the money for some decent teeth.

  He was wandering the streets chewing on his dissatisfaction, no longer wondering how best to manage for Hilde and Walter, no longer planning where the next meal was coming from, just writhing around in the rottenness of his life. It was only when he entered Münzstrasse and the black-coated Jews with their straggly beards flapped across his vision that he became aware of where he was. He looked around at the decaying buildings and poked his head into dingy courtyards: these Jews with their tatty clothes and bent bodies were nearly as poor as he, yet seemed not to have it so hard. And suddenly he felt the unfairness of it all: his poor was the worst poor of all. Even Jews had jobs and families, even Jews had teeth. And so lost himself in wanting or else would not have attacked the pastry-cook, not in this area with the pastry-cook a shout away from friends. Not anywhere for that matter, Heini was a thief not a brute.

  The Jew wasn’t hurt, nor did he seem particularly scared. He steadied Heini with a clean hand on his sleeve and calming words. And Heini would never understand how it happened, but there he was minutes later walking down the street with an old Jew he’d just attacked, and he’s talking like a burst drain with no hint of running dry, talking when he should have been out of there.

  Heini had never been one for conversation. He was partial to a smoke and the occasional chat, but mostly was happy with his own company. As for complaining about his measly life, it would only make him look weak, and besides, no one would be interested. But the old Jew not only listened he actually encouraged, asking question after question in an odd clotted speech that sounded like he’d swallowed German and brought it up thicker. And whether it was the novelty of it all or Heini was simply at the end of his tether, the words gushed out of him like they’d been lying in wait for just the right moment. By the time they stopped outside a pastry shop, Heini felt as if he’d spilled his whole life.

  ‘This is my place,’ the old man said, indicating the shop.‘If you want, you can come in.’

  Heini wasn’t thinking straight. He’d attacked a Jew, he’d talked more in the past few minutes than he had in the past few months, and now without a moment’s hesitation he was entering a Jewish shop. The smell of baking knuckled into his nostrils and shot straight to his glands. The old man offered a dish of small pastries each shaped like a crescent moon. Heini took one if only to stop his talking, then another and another; they melted in his salivary mouth. Such special food made him feel important, much the same, he suspected, as owning a shirt collar or a second pair of shoes. And in that moment he knew that if ever the day came when he ate pastry regularly, he would have left the Scheunenviertel far behind.

  ‘Choose,’ the old man said, waving an arm at his cakes. ‘Anything you like for your brother and sister. Choose.’

  Heini was used to taking what was available and never anything left over; surrounded by such plenty he was at a loss. The old Jew saw his trouble, and after a moment he selected a tart large enough for ten brothers and sisters and put it in a box.

  ‘This,’ he said pointing to the tart, ‘is the best in Berlin. A perfect Pflaumenküchen.’ He uttered the word as if he were tasting it.‘I know because I have tested. Some make the pastry too thick, or the plums they slice too thin, or they make mean with the fruit. But this,’ and he was triumphant, ‘this is the real Pflaumenküchen.’ He closed the box and pushed it towards Heini.

  In his whole life Heini had never tasted a plum much less a cake full of them. And probably wouldn’t now, for surely the man would want something in return. With a glance at the box, he said nothing, just turned to leave. But the old man persevered.

  ‘Take it,’ he said.

  Heini felt himself hesitate. ‘You sure yo
u don’t want any money? You don’t want anything at all?’

  ‘No, no. I give it to you. I can tell, you’re not a bad boy.’

  And Heini wanted to say, and you’re not a bad Jew either – but was unpractised with compliments.

  The cake was delicious. And even though he, Hilde and Walter ate a piece whenever they pleased, it lasted a full two days.

  ‘I bet if you went back to that Jew’s shop, he’d give you another,’Walter said.

  And probably he would, but Heini had to decide first whether the old man with his talking was good for him. It was like that initial time at school when he didn’t know the routines: he was attracted but also unnerved by the strangeness. In the end he returned – for the conversation more than the food, and returned many times after that, pausing a moment at the threshold of the shop to step out of the stab and grind of his usual life into his very own make-believe.

  The old Jew always seemed pleased to see him. He liked people, he said, and he liked to talk.

  ‘I know plenty of people you wouldn’t like,’ Heini said one day.‘Rough people, bad people.’

  ‘Bad? Good? Only God judges.’

  God certainly wasn’t working overtime, Heini thought, and must have allowed the thought to rise to his face.

  ‘You have to forgive, Heini,’ the old Jew said.

  He liked it best when the old man told him stories from his own life. Compared with Heini’s family who had always lived within a shout of Alexanderplatz, the Jew’s life could fill an adventure book. His ancestors had come from a town called Gollancz near the border of Poland and Russia – he showed Heini the exact spot on his very own map. A long time before the Jew was born, his family had left Gollancz and slowly moved westwards. They would stop in a town for a few years until the local people started attacking Jews, and then they would move on to another town until the attacks started there too. It was in one of these towns that the old Jew had been born. Step by step, attack by attack, they had moved westwards. Finally, when the man was about the same age as Heini, his family had arrived in Berlin.