The mother and child in front of me started walking again, so I followed at the same pace. I saw a logo tag, small yet visible from a distance, sewn into the hood of the child’s white down jacket, for a company that once specialized in mountaineering gear for alpine climbers but was now known for its top-of-the-line children’s clothing. The jacket must have cost several hundred euros. In this area, there were people who thought nothing of shelling out a couple of thousand euros, or even five thousand, to get their child ready for winter.

Robots used to be naked, but now they’re all decked out in fancy clothes, I thought, and at that very moment the child swung around to stare at me. “Don’t go making me into a robot,” his eyes protested, “because I’m not.” Apparently he sensed how much fun I’d had been having, playing with the notion that he was a machine. Clinging to his mother’s coat, his neck still twisted around to glare at me, he walked several steps before stumbling and nearly falling. “Be careful where you place your feet,” his mother scolded gently. “Why are you always looking behind you?” I detected a slight southern, Swabian lilt in her speech.

I had read in the newspaper about young couples who, having inherited sizable fortunes, were moving from southern Germany to raise their children in this district of Berlin. They were not conservative the way wealthy people were thirty or forty years ago, but a new, green generation. Expensive cars were the sign of older wealthy people, but this new generation, who hated all sorts of cars, rode bicycles instead. While the old guard had feasted on thick steaks, the new wealthy class stuck to their vegetarian diets. All the food they cooked at home was organic and additive-free. Before buying coffee or chocolate, they made sure that the beans had been grown on farms where the workers’ rights were respected. This applied to clothing as well, so there’d be a pamphlet detailing the working conditions of everyone involved in the production of, say, a pair of knitted socks. This drove the price up but perhaps gave the buyers the satisfaction of knowing that the more they paid, the greater their contribution toward saving the world.

A “wealthy person” is apparently defined as someone who has enough money so that five generations, including his or her own, can manage without working.

Now about ten yards ahead of me, the boy shook off his mother’s hand and started walking backward with both arms stuck out for balance like a tightrope walker. The sidewalk had been shoveled; though bits of snow still stuck to the pavement like sugar, the ice had melted, so there was no danger of him slipping and falling. With high mounds of snow on either side to keep him from wandering out into the street, I suppose you could say the snow was actually keeping him safe. The mother still calmly followed him with her eyes. As a child, I myself had played at walking backward, but that was so long ago I’d forgotten there was such a game. Walking backward, your legs feel as if they don’t belong to you. They’re sticks—too long, and they only bend at strange angles. I used to wonder if this was what having wooden legs would be like.