“But, you should understand, boy, that once upon a time, not everything came out of a plastic extruder by the twenty millions. Once things were made by hand. One at a time. And there weren’t so many, many, many things. There were just a few things. Even for rich people, there weren’t so very many things. So each thing became more important. Can you imagine going to the pawn shop... does he know what a pawn shop is?”
“Ask him, not me,” I say.
“What’s a pawn shop, David?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a place where you leave something valuable and they loan you money.”
“Dad just uses his card at the bank.”
‘Right,” Grandpop says, “I understand. Me too. But once, they didn’t do that. When you borrowed money, you had to leave something tangible behind. Something that the person who loaned you the money could hold onto, even sell, if you didn’t pay back. In the old days, you could leave a coat and borrow money.”
“A coat?” David says, incredulous. As well he might in these days of cheap, and truth to be told, disposable clothing.
“Right, exactly. Material things, they had value. Not just big things like cars, but watches and jackets, even hats. And rugs.”
“How did you get the rug, Grandpop?”
I just sighed and shook my head.
“I stole it,” he says.
I throw up my hands, make the sound of exasperation, drop my hands and shake my head.
“You stole it?”
“Pop, do you have to do this?”
“Yes, I stole it,” David’s grandfather says without a trace of shame. Even embarrassment. Without a thought of discretion.
“What kind of role model, what kind of ideas are you putting in my son’s head?”
“Just truth,” he says.
“It’s not funny,” I say.
“There’s funny and there’s funny,” he says.
“My dad says not to steal things. He makes me give things back when I steal them,” my wonderful son says.
“Your father is absolutely right,” the subversive old man says without a hint of sincerity.
“Did you steal a lot of things?” my son asks.
“You bet,” his grandfather says.
“Great, just great,” I say.
“Really, Grandpop,” David says, as wide eyed and fascinated as you would expect.
“Really, David,” Grandpop says. “I was a thief.”
I suspect that damage is being done here that will take me years to undo. A rogue, an absolute rogue.
“I was more than a thief. I was about the best thief in Munich. Which was a very great place to be a thief because it was then, as it is now, a very rich city. With many rich people who loved expensive things. As they do now. Even though then there was a depression and what is called hyper-inflation. Do you know what hyper-inflation is?”
“He’s six, for God’s sake,” I point out.
“Like in Brazil,” my son says. What does he know about Brazil. The kid hardly knows how to buy a candy bar and get correct change.
“It means that every day the money is worth less. Yesterday a candy bar is fifty cents, tomorrow it costs a dollar. A week later, you need two dollars. Than five dollars. In two, three weeks, a candy bar costs ten dollars. Then twenty. That’s hyper-inflation. So it was better to have things than to have money. I never stole money. You understand why?”
“Stealing money is bad?” my son offers as a reason not to steal money. That’s the reason he learned at home.
“Because when you have hyperinflation money is worthless. It’s junk. It’s garbage.”
My wife, listening to this begins to gesture at me frantically. This is a conversation I’m not looking forward to. I’m a fairly weak-willed fellow, or, if you wish to be polite, easy-going, and I tend to go whichever way the wind blows. What it is, I’m actually pretty resilient and self-satisfied, so a lot of things just don’t matter to me because there is something at the center that stays fairly pleased with itself even when the weather changes. And they are both, my father and my wife, very strong-willed people. I have never been able to silence either one of them or stop either one of them from saying what they thought needed saying, however little it actually needed saying.
“I’ll make some tea,” I said. Why? Why not say, Pop, I’m going into the kitchen so my wife can tell me to tell you to shut up because this is most emphatically not a story for a six-year old boy. Theft is just the beginning. There’s violence and despair and murder.
“He’s six years old, for God’s sake,” my wife says. Severely.
“No shit,” I say.
“Well, aren’t you going to stop him?”
“Why don’t you stop him?” I say.
“He’s your grandfather,” she says. This is marital tennis. Not a match game by any means, really just a warm-up, stroking matters back and forth.
“He knows David is six. So maybe he has some reason for telling it now.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, what reason could there be for telling a six-year old his grandfather was a thief, a professional thief.”
“He was, to hear him tell it, the prince of thieves. He was a cat burglar. Actually, he rather relishes himself as Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” my wife says.
I say, “Achievement is always to be admired.”
She is not amused. She says so. She is frequently not amused. I frequently dream about being away from news of non-amusement.
“Maybe he wants to tell David to always be the best you can be, no, the best there is, no matter what your field of endeavor. And do it with style and panache. I mean my father was no worse, or not much worse, than D’Artagnan.” David and I are reading The Three Musketeers together. What a revelation to rediscover them. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan were appalling by contemporary standards. They’re all common brawlers who go around drinking in bars, then refusing to pay, then getting into knife fights and stabbing people, sometimes to death. Alright, the knives are really big and they call them swords, but I can’t see the difference. On the moral plane at any rate. Porthos and Aramis both live off of women. D’Artagnan claims to be in love with one woman, makes love to another, without a moment’s hesitation, then jumps all over the second woman’s maid, not even out of lust, but so he can use her. I am more than faintly envious. Athos, the most noble and sensitive and aristocratic of the bunch, murders his wife. Twice. Why? Because he discovered that she had once been convicted of a crime, had been branded, as in having a brand burnt into her flesh with a hot iron just like they do to cows in cowboy movies. The only remotely moral message implicit in these events seems to be get it right the first time.
“Tell him to stop,” she says.
“No.”
“Tell him,” she commands. Demands. Requires.
“Why don’t you tell him?” I suggest, sensibly, thoughtfully, fairly.
“He’s your father,” she says.
I resist the temptation to say, I knew that. I say, “Exactly.”