This can’t be, he thought again. I’m only imagining it. A week ago I was still the owner of Becker Scrap and Salvage Co.… and a few hours ago I was still a man with over thirty thousand marks … a man who still had many prospects, in spite of everything. A man with thirty thousand marks is still fully capable of living. I had endless possibilities … I just ought to have taken advantage of them! All the travel, the struggle, the worries, the self-torment, the brooding … it was all in vain. My entire life has been meaningless, everything I’ve ever achieved … There I was running around Berlin as the merchant Otto Silbermann … I had a family … I had friends … I had a wonderful life … I was rooted … No, I wasn’t rooted, I only imagined I was … this is the only life that’s real, that’s genuine … this bench here … the empty pockets … the police station where I don’t dare enter … that is the authentic Silbermann existence … I’m perched on a bench in the void, and when they close the station they’ll kick me out and I won’t even have that anymore.

His hand stroked the wooden seat.

This is what I have accomplished, he thought. For this I sneaked across the border and begged two gendarmes for a little air. Ach, if I’d only given it one more try! He sighed, lost.

Then he suddenly leapt up.

“I want my money back,” he growled. “My thirty thousand marks!”

Once more he went over to the station. I’ll show you who I am, he thought, in desperate fury, only to stop again outside the door.

He looked at his wallet to see how much money he had left. “Two hundred twenty, two hundred thirty, two hundred forty,” he counted quickly, in a low voice. He still had bills worth two hundred eighty marks.

Tomorrow, he decided, and turned away from the station and headed toward the exit. Tomorrow …

A low-level employee, he then reasoned, can live off two hundred eighty marks for several months. What will the thief do with my money? He has no idea it belonged to a Jew, so it’s possible he’s afraid they’re trying to track him down, and maybe my briefcase is roaming with him all across the country.

He headed out of the station but stopped at the exit.

In 1919, when we opened the firm Seelig and Silbermann, my investment amounted to thirty thousand marks, he recalled nostalgically. Twenty thousand from Father, and ten thousand that I borrowed from Bruno. Those thirty thousand marks were my beginning! And now they are my end. Up to this point I’d only lost what I’d earned, but now I’ve lost the source of those earnings, and what might have let me earn more in the future.