a money carrier

It is summer and the lockdown is easing; I went to pick up my disreputable, battered guitar from a studio where I’d left it lying, the week before the virus took hold. Such a beautiful morning. The clouds are massed on spires like whipped cream on biscuits and the trees bend in all along the avenues, blessing Berlin. Riding home I stopped for eggs and a loaf of bread. The woman who begs silently outside the greengrocers sat on her accustomed stool; we always smile at each other. This morning however her smile was as sad as my chest. I stood in the doorway with the doors opening and shutting either side of me, holding a fist to my heart. Yes, she said, nodding, her eyes brimming.

In Germany you can buy bread nearly everywhere. Even on this quiet street there is another baker four doors down. I stood there trying not to wonder. Once you start to wonder, paralysis is apt to set in: they offer 35 varieties of loaf and I once went into a freeze in another busy bakery where I counted 73 kinds of bread. With sunflower seeds? or without. What kind of grain? Then you must decide: the whole loaf or only the half? Sliced, or not? Sliced thick? or thin. The woman handed me my whole loaf and I said, blurring through the cotton mask, Ah, no – just the half, please.

She pulled out half the slices and laid them aside, unsaleable now. “It’s hard to be clear, isn’t it,” I said. “Because of the masks.”

I had ducked in here last week to get milk and as I walked in I uddenly remembered: no mask. So I decided for once to bolt through without wearing protection. At the fridges a German woman remarked to someone standing behind me, “She – has no mask on!” Germanness is kindly meant and makes everything everybody’s business. But it can also leave a gracious lady begging outside a store unattended, and can lead strangers to speak about rather than to one another, as though we were merely objects on a landscape.

I chose two apples, perfectly reeded with green and red, glossy and plump. Outside, I offered one to my friend. One for me, I showed her: one for you. They link us. She smiled faintly as she rubbed it on her skirts to clean the wax. As I unlocked my bike an older lady with frantic eyes approached from inside the store. “Have you lost a Portmonnaie?” A money carrier. I clapped myself all over for my purse. “Oh, wow, I must have left it behind.”

“What does it look like?” I described it. I didn’t know the German word for ‘battered.’ She held it out to triumphantly, concealed very neatly under her own. “That is so kind of you, thank you,” I said, stashing the purse in my bag. “And now,” she went out, holding out her hand, ” – you give me five euros finder’s fee.”

“Oh!” Behind me I could see the Romany woman shaking her head. “Well, that’s – “

“Five times I have given back purses,” she said, “and no one ever even thanks me.”

“Oh! But I do thank you!” I propped the scarred guitar in my basket lest it fall. “It’s very kind, I appreciate it. But it seems – “

“If not,” she said, “then I – “

“You take back the purse?” I started to wheel my bike away. Her claw hand came down on the rim of its basket. “You’re actually trying to stop me from leaving?”

The electric glass doors opened and I raised my voice just enough to be audible at the bakery counter. “Hello? This lady has found my purse. She won’t let me go without a five euro finder fee.”

The bakery assistant came hurriedly round the counter and stood between us on the footpath. The older woman began to shout. “Five times! I have given back purses! No one even thanks me!”

“But I do thank you,” I said again. “Thank you very much.”

“She should give five euros. It’s just a finder fee. Otherwise I take the purse back and give it to the police.”

A woman entering the shop had paused. “Look at her,” she told my assailant, gesturing at my ragged basket, my rusted bike, my outfit. Thanks! “She also has nothing. She’s also doing it hard. Look, she has to play on this terrible old guitar in the streets, just to make a little money.”

I said, “It’s lovely that you have helped me.” The woman was still shouting. “But I don’t wish to be yelled at by you just because you have done something kind.”

“This is the last time!” she was shouting. “I’ll never give a purse back again. Next time, the police. You have changed my character.”

I had started to cry. The expression on the face of my Rom friend, to whom in three years of passing this spot I had never given five euros, was full of a complex wry compassion. How different it feels, to be asked, to have something demanded. How varied is privilege and presumption. How difficult we make it, to do right by one another. Yet it’s always still possible. “Be kind whenever possible. It’s always possible.” I thanked the bakery saleswoman from the grocery store and thanked the customer and pushed my bike uphill, discombobulated utterly. The shouting woman, still shouting, had climbed on her own bike. We had to travel in a convoy a little way and she kept shouting, to the world at large. “This woman owes me five euros! She won’t give it!” I turned away up my own street and bent my head to the handlebars, crying. Why is this place so desperate and why is the summer so short? How could he leave after such a stupid fight? How come the bookshops, like this one with its wheeled gondolas colouring the streetside, stayed open right through the pandemic and yet we treat each other, sometimes in some places, as though kindness and insight were a mere imposition, as though I were the only one here.