Фолькер Кучер - Goldstein

The place smelled of wood and glue and fresh paint. She was alone with the darkness and the silence, with only her breathing and the faint tick of the watch in her jacket pocket for company. The man seemed to have disappeared again, yet she decided to wait a little longer, stretching to get the blood flowing through her arms and legs. At least there were no coat hangers on the rail; she could see a chink of light through the crack in the door. She took the watch from her jacket pocket. It was just gone nine. The night watchman would soon be completing his rounds on the sixth floor.

Confirmation came with the grinding of the lift, echoing so loudly through the darkness that she gave a start. It was time. He was on his way back down, and in the next few hours would only be concerned with the roller grilles in front of the doors and display windows, with making sure that everything was locked and no one could break in.

Alex carefully opened the wardrobe and peered out. Better safe than sorry, Benny always said. The neon signs on Tauentzienstrasse shone so much colour through the windows there was no need for a torch. She could see everything: the luxurious show bedroom, with a bed wide enough for a whole family and a carpet so soft her feet sank into it. When she thought back to the scratchy coconut matting in front of the bed she had shared with her little brother, Karl, when she was still living with her parents, in digs that were as murky as they were cramped… What had become of Karl? She didn’t even know if the cops had gone looking for him after Beckmann’s death. She didn’t miss her family, but she’d have liked to see him again.

Alex spun around at a movement on the edge of her vision. The big mirror on the dressing table reflected an eighteen-year-old girl staring defiantly back, legs in baggy trousers and hair held in place by a coarsely woven linen cap. She gave herself a wry grin.

Pausing at the end of the elegantly decorated plywood panel that served as a makeshift bedroom wall, she peered around the corner. It was hardly necessary. The night watchman wouldn’t make another round of the shop floor before morning, towards the end of his shift. She knew that from Kalli. There wasn’t a soul around and it was a nice feeling, knowing that all this belonged to her for the next few hours. Her and Benny.

Alex found her way without difficulty. The restless, dappled light from outside, flickering constantly between one colour and the next, was more than enough. She had committed the most important things to memory a few hours before when the place was full of people. Behind her were the doors leading to the southern stairwell and, to the left, past the wall of curtain fabrics, was the access to the escalators.

Everything was calm. Traffic noise was muffled, almost unreal, a dull murmur from a different world that had nothing to do with its magical counterpart inside. She entered the deserted curtain section that seemed like a fairy-tale castle, long drapes hanging from ceiling to floor in silk, satin and net. As a little girl, she had often stood here in astonishment, clasping her mother’s hand. Young Alexandra soon understood that her mother never came to buy, only to dream. Take it all in, she had said, we proles may not be able to afford anything here, but they can’t stop us from looking.

They had never had enough money to buy things in the west, not even when Father was still in work and Mother had her cleaning job. In fact it had been rare for them to venture outside of Boxhagener Kiez. The Ku’damm, KaDeWe and Tauentzienstrasse – for her father these places were a symbol of wasteful capitalism, the west of the city a hotbed of vice to be avoided like the devil avoided holy water. If not for Mother the stubborn old man would never have allowed himself to be talked into those occasional summer visits to the zoo, but even Emil Reinhold understood that you shouldn’t deprive working-class children of the wonders of nature. Alex had never cared to see creatures suffering behind bars, however, and by the polar bears she would already be thinking of the return journey. The Reinhold family was accustomed to strolling the length of Tauentzienstrasse before boarding the U-Bahn at Wittenbergplatz and heading back to the east. At the first shop windows Emil Reinhold would begin his recurring sermon about the excesses of capitalism, even if Alex and her mother had their eyes fixed on the displays. The KaDeWe displays held a kind of magic for Alex. In Mother’s eyes, too, was the sparkle of long-forgotten dreams of a better life, a life which the dictatorship of the proletariat could never hope to provide. Father never noticed, or never wanted to notice. He continued his sermon to the captive audience of his sons, above all to Karl, who took everything so seriously. Karl, the prince of the proletariat, the staunch Communist, who was now in hiding from the cops just like his thieving sister.

Alex had almost reached the escalators when a noise brought her back to the present, a hard clack , more immediate than the padded roar of traffic. She crouched behind two giant rolls of cloth and listened: something was banging against the glass, clattering and scratching against one of the windows. She tried to place the sounds. A fluttering, then a cooing. Venturing from her hiding place, behind the neon-lit pane of glass she saw the silhouettes of two pigeons resting on the window ledge.

She took a deep breath to still her beating heart. First the mirror and now this! Benny would kill himself laughing if he could see her. When had she become so easily startled? When she realised her messed-up life was more important than she cared to admit?

With a loud flap of wings, the pigeons swooped back into the night and Alex continued on her way, the nervous tension accumulated during those long hours in the wardrobe all but evaporated. She enjoyed her night-time stroll through the silent department store more with each passing step. It was as if everything had fallen into a hundred-year sleep, and she was the only person awake in this enchanted kingdom. KaDeWe outstripped all the other department stores they had shut themselves in until now; Tietz for sure, but even the enormity of Karstadt on Hermannplatz paled against the magnificence of Tauentzienstrasse.

She left the curtain section and reached the escalators. The metal steps stood deserted and motionless as if an evil fairy had turned everything to ice. It was five storeys down to their agreed meeting point on the ground floor: the tobacco section, as always. It had become a kind of ritual, to stock up on brands they could never otherwise afford. Benny had a nose for the stuff.

She had met him on a freezing cold day in February, quarrelling over a cigarette butt that some snotty-nosed, rich little upstart had thrown half-smoked onto the pavement in front of Bahnhof Zoo, a few weeks after all that crap with Beckmann. Alex had already spent the money she had stolen from that fatso at the Christmas market. She was hungry and hadn’t had a cigarette in two days.

They pounced on the butt in the same instant, she and this slender, almost dainty blond boy, who, despite his awkward appearance, wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. He moved quickly, but not as quickly as Alex. He glared at her, a look she had returned with interest, so much did her body crave the nicotine. It was a miracle they had managed to make peace and share the fag-end. No doubt it was his eyes that did it.