Free The Prosperous Thief by Andrea Goldsmith

much-needed holiday and already her thoughts driving it into the ground. But it’s not easy to forget what you once were, what in your heart you still believe yourself to be. If people could moult like animals, shed part of themselves, would she shed her Germanness or her Jewishness? And even now, after all that has happened, she is torn between desire:German, and reality: Jew. As for her daughter, today’s Germans leave a stain on her. She sees Alice trying to equate them with the Germans of her storybooks and family lore. Tell me about the Kaiser, Alice will say to her grandmother, tell me how he gave a medal to Opa. She watches her daughter struggling to understand how it was possible for the Kaiser, the highest German in the land, to honour her grandfather, a Jew, when Jews are now the lowest of the low. The other day Alice asked Renate whether they were bad Jews – Renate and Martin, Oma, even Alice herself, unlike her grandfather who was a good enough Jew to receive the Kaiser’s medal. Her daughter struggles, but how can you explain to a child she is what everyone hates?
    She glances at Alice kneeling on the seat, looking out at the passing scenery, her little girl so happy to be out and about, and makes a pledge to turn her back on all grim thoughts for today. She scoops her daughter onto her lap, slides up close to the window, and together they identify the familiar landmarks. And Renate talks as if things are as they once were, activating a type of selective vision which sees the trees and not the banners in the branches, the houses and not the swastikas in the windows, the people in ordinary clothes and not those in uniform.
    Once in Düsseldorf they take a tram to the Königsallee, not for the shops, the usual reason for promenading along the Kö, but for Alice to see the four-sided clocktower which they must circle slowly to make absolutely sure the time is the same on all four sides, and then to stand at a very particular spot near the moat which runs down the centre of the Kö so Alice can make a wish over the sea god Triton spraying water into the stream.
    ‘What will you wish?’ Martin asks, knowing even as he speaks that his daughter, a powerful believer in the secrecy of wishes, won’t reveal. Although a few days after her last birthday, long enough, she believed, for her wish to be safe, she confessed she always made the same wish: that everyone and everything would be as it used to be, including her grandfather alive again, Martin at his business, and she allowed to go to school. Now as she tries to change the world, her eyes closed and lips silently moving, Martin feels the tears bulge and a choking in his throat. It would make a fine and moving scene in a film, if only it were not his daughter.
    It is a perfect day of bright sun and soft breeze, more like late September than early November. They head off towards the Aldstadt , not to take coffee because most of the cafés display signs warning off Jews, but to buy an ice for Alice from a more lackadaisical or less nationalistic street vendor. Alice walks between her parents and every now and then they swing her high in the air. One, two, three and over the crack. One, two, three and over the gutter. Such a lovely day and so pleased they have come, and no one is taking any notice of them and Martin finds himself thinking that perhaps things are not so bad, perhaps Renate is right and the worst is already in the past. He feels lighter, freer, as if he’d been in pain for months and only now as it eases can he appreciate how very wearying it has been.
    They reach Heinrich-Heine-Allee and are about to cross when their attention is caught by a flurry of activity on the opposite corner. The Breidenbacher Hof is dripping with swastikas; there’s a swirl of high-ranking SS at the entrance and a crowd milling on the footpath. This is the hotel where Hitler stays when he visits Düsseldorf, and for a brief terrifying moment Martin thinks that Hitler is