The Prosperous Thief (4 page)

Heini didn’t understand.

‘Clothes, he makes clothes – and these Australians, they must want to buy. Last I heard he was driving around in his own motor car.’

Heini wondered why the pastry-cook didn’t go to Australia.

‘Too old,’ he said, stroking his ragged beard.‘But you’re not.’

Heini laughed. Germany didn’t think he was worth much, otherwise he’d have a better life. So why on earth would Australia want him?

‘I’m telling you,’ the old man said, ‘if they take my cousin, they’ll take anyone. The country, it’s too big,’ and again the odd shrugging with the hands,‘they have to fill it somehow.’

Over the next several months, until just after he turned seventeen, Heini visited the old Jew. Except for Hilde and Walter, he told no one, for while there didn’t seem much reason to hate Jews more than you’d hate anyone else, nearly everyone did. In fact, if Jew hatred were a business, Heini found himself thinking, a man could make a fortune.

For the first few visits Heini wasn’t allowed to touch anything. His was a kosher shop, the old man explained, Jewish food for Jewish customers. But later he gave Heini a space of his own well away from the other workbenches, with his own bowl and implements. He would make him scrub his hands until they looked like someone else’s then show him how to beat a mixture or roll out pastry.

‘Perhaps one day you’ll be a pastry-cook like me,’ the old man said.

More likely just an older thief, Heini thought, but nonetheless enjoyed the work, how you start with a little bit of this and a little bit of that and in the end you have a whole cake or tart. And the talk, he enjoyed the talk. The old man was a gift. In his words, in his kindness, in the cakes he gave to Heini to take home, he was a gift. And in return? Heini did not know and neither could he ask.

He returned to the shop again and again. He found himself wanting to be with the old man more than he wanted to do anything else. The old man was pleasure for pleasure’s sake, something Heini had never before experienced, something he knew that in his sort of life couldn’t possibly last. And there was a grating against his heart. Heini wasn’t accustomed to kindness and the old man’s kindness was making him soft. The Jew was just like his cakes, a luxury Heini couldn’t afford, so he tried to visit less often. But he couldn’t stick to his plan, and in the end – it was hard, so hard – he forced himself to stay away altogether.

The twenties had been so bad for the inhabitants of the Scheunenviertel it was hard to imagine it could get any worse. But when the Depression hit, bad took on a whole new definition. The Scheunenviertel swelled with newcomers. Heini saw men in good coats with nothing but their hands in their pockets, men who were strangers to being poor and very bad at it. And children with hunger clinging to their bones crowding the streets and courtyards. Heini stopped thinking about the old Jew, he stopped thinking about a better life; just surviving each day took all his energy.

By 1934 when things began to improve, Heini had done two short stints in prison for stealing from the wrong pockets – although hard to know what pockets would have been right when practically all were empty. Walter had fared much better. He had joined Hitler’s Stormtroopers and was rising through the ranks. Hilde was still Hilde, under Heini’s wing and still afraid. As for work, Heini might have joined the SA himself but they were not his type of men. He’d seen them in action all his life, first with his mother then with Hilde and now with anyone who stood in their way.

The long years of the Depression had been bad for thieving, and at a time when it should have been easier, with so many people in uniform, Heini still was out of luck. No matter how much he planned, there was always someone on the lookout, someone paid to keep the law. With obstacles looming at every turn, Heini no longer had the heart for thieving, so again he decided to try the countryside. He felt more prepared this time, older, wiser, and his stints in prison had taught him how to survive away from the noise and bustle of Berlin. He found a motherly type to keep an eye on Hilde, gathered his belongings and followed the path of the river out of the city. As soon as he was beyond the city limits, he took off his clothes and washed away the crawling grime from his body, then lay his clothes and himself on the ground in a small clearing to dry.

It was quiet, only the sound of birds and the intermittent chug and shout from the river. He lay on his back, shading his eyes from the sun and feeling cool droplets of water snaking over his scalp; they tickled in a pleasant sort of way. With the city now behind him, he decided to put a wall between his old life and the new. A fresh start, he told himself, and no turning back.

But the countryside was not kind to him. Heini didn’t know the life nor did he know how to work for a boss. He was hired to cut grass, and so he did until he was tired, and then he rested. But sitting was permitted only after all the cutting was finished. He would cut much better after he regained his breath, he said, and soon found himself out of work. In his next job he was dismissed for felling too many trees. He was just providing the firewood he had been asked for, he said, and was told he had cut trees enough for the whole village.

At his next position he hoed a vegetable garden and planted the seeds in rows exactly as directed by Frau S, a fat, shrill woman with a pretty daughter.

‘In rows,’ she shouted periodically from her kitchen just to make sure.

And in rows they went, just like he was told. And such delight when the sprouting began, like the thrill when the old Jew’s pastries puffed up in the oven. As Heini watched the seedlings grow, he was thinking he might become a farmer. The farm was large enough for more than one family, and daughters who would not see twenty again needed a husband. He was dreaming of staying forever, learning to ride a horse, learning to plough a field, sending for Walter and Hilde and marrying the pretty daughter, when he was grabbed by the mother and dragged to the vegetable garden.

What had he done? The rows were perfect, all the vegetables sprouting.What had he done?

She was yelling at him and calling him stupid. Corn, she jabbed at one plant, beans, she jabbed at the next, potatoes at the next.

‘It’s a salad of a row,’ she screamed at him, and told him to get out before she set the dogs onto him.

The best two months of his life and he was booted out with even less than when he arrived, although fortunately not the daughter’s virtue. Two more jobs in the country and he tossed it in and returned to Berlin. He may have lost the heart for stealing but at least he knew what the job required.And Hilde was so happy to have him home, and there was more money about and better food. Even Walter marching in his black boots was happy. Everyone seemed happier.

And perhaps that was the problem, things became too easy and Heini stopped looking over his shoulder. When he was arrested in the spring of 1936 just before the Berlin Olympics and put away, not for a few months but for two years, Heini knew he’d run out of luck. And when they sent him not to the old prison but the new camp at Orianienberg-Sachsenhausen, he knew he was done for. And when two years later he was released, and Hilde had disappeared along with life as he had known it, he thought his luck was still running backwards. But only briefly. With a past so tarnished you couldn’t even give it away, he decided it was no great loss. Not even Hilde. He searched for a few weeks and then he gave up. He’d provided what protection he could, now she had to manage without him.

Only two years, but so much had changed. Everywhere were men in uniform, boys too, poor people like him making a go of it. Life was better, much better under Hitler, and only a Jew would dispute it.Without any difficulty Heini found himself a proper job in a munitions factory building gun carriages for the thousand-year Reich. It was a far cry from the pastry-cook of his old dreams, but he liked the work and for the first time in his life he felt he was doing something worthwhile. And his country seemed to value him, that was a first too. Heini would look around and feel a sense of belonging – not that he made friends, it had never been his way, but he felt part of a big important movement. Life was good, life was very good.

Occasionally he thought of the old Jew, the only person ever to think he might amount to something, and one day, dressed in his first ever new coat with a nice lambswool collar, he made his way into the Jewish streets. Heini hardly recognised the area. The shops were daubed with slogans, the Jewish star in careless paint was slapped on walls and windows, the streets were largely deserted, shutters were drawn, shops were boarded up; the air was stilted and eerily hushed. He felt the furtive glances of Jews behind their windows: they did not want him here, although would want a German in uniform even less. He pushed on regardless until he reached the pastry-cook’s shop. The shutters were drawn, the dust on the slats lay thick and hard. No one had been here for a long time. Heini peered through a gap in the shutters; there was nothing but blackness within.

Suddenly he was aware of what he was doing, a German in a new coat peering like a thief into the darkness of an old Jew’s shop, and turned sharply away – from the old Jew, from these streets, from the past. He should have had more sense: with a life such as his, sentimentality was not a terrain he had explored or was ever likely to. And yet as he hurried away he was aware of his disappointment. He had wanted to show the Jew he had made something of his life.

With a clogging in his throat, Heini pushed himself fast from the old familiar streets, past Museumsinsel and into Unter den Linden. He walked briskly up the broad avenue, crossed over Friedrichstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse, pushed himself away from his old life, past the swirl of rich foreigners at the Adlon Hotel, right up to the Brandenburg Gate. There he stopped and looked back.

The thoroughfare stretching before him was bursting with activity. The new linden trees, planted when the underground construction was completed, were now nearly as high as the banners. Heini breathed deeply and the pain in his throat eased. The old Jew, together with Hilde and Walter, the only people ever to have cared about him, were his past, but this – the grand buildings, the smart people, the green lindens, the bright red and black banners – this was his future. Little remained of his old life, and soon it would be just a scuffling at the back of his mind. There was still the problem of his teeth, but he had a job, and a room shared with just one other fellow, and with so many opportunities for people like him, it was anyone’s guess what the future had in store. Heini looked down the broad avenue. Mingled with the fancy tourists were men in uniform going about their business, men who looked no different from himself. Men who had turned to the new Germany and seen it had a place for them.

He stood in the crowd, absently rubbing his sore gums. At twenty-eight years of age he was no angel, but neither was he useless. He’d been to school, he had a proper job, he made honest money. There was opportunity in the air, he could smell it. He might find a wife, settle down, he might even join the army. And suddenly he realised that he, Heinrik Heck, could do anything. His country wanted him and in return it would look after him and, with a stab of pain deep into his jaw, his rotting teeth too.

Out of a Job in the New Germany

A
bout a kilometre from Heinrik Heck and the hubbub of Unter den Linden, a well-dressed couple enter Tiergartenstrasse from the southern edge of the park. Across the road at number seventeen is the British Passport Control Office. Martin Lewin points it out to his wife who scarcely glances at the building. And when he urges her forward, she holds her ground, so he loops his arm through hers and leads. As they step onto the road the wind swipes her scarf; straining against her neck, the ribbon of underwater blues streaks back towards the park. With the intransigence of her gait, the granite set of her face, her husband pulling one way, the scarf streaming the other, Renate Lewin looks to be in flight against herself. But still Martin leads, a small man, shorter than his wife, but determined. When they reach the other side of the road, Renate refuses to go any further. Martin pauses a moment before taking her hand and removing her glove, ever so slowly. He presses his mouth to her palm, then turns the hand and glides his lips across the bony stretch of her fingers. Suddenly she smiles, an attractive woman in a modern, stylised way, and he smiles back.