Shifengi Coin

The four-pfennig coin is both a talisman and a small instrument of anonymous care. When the narrator finds one in a pair of trousers among abandoned bags, he discovers a counterpart to his own: also dated 1932 and marked with the letter A for Berlin. He could keep both as protection against misfortune, but instead exchanges them, leaving his own charm in the trousers for whoever lives there. The coin’s significance lies in this quiet reversal: a private token of luck becomes a gift to a stranger whose need seems greater.

Appearance and Discovery

The coin appears among money in the pocket of a gray pair of trousers. The narrator has been resting beneath a road, where the living above make a tremendous noise; the bags beside him are full, and when his foot tips one over, clothes spill out. As he pushes them back, a ten-pfennig piece clinks loose, and he finds more coins in the trousers: ones, fives, tens, and one larger copper piece marked with an eagle on one side and a large four on the other.

The larger coin is an unexpected find. The narrator knows no one else who owns a four-pfennig coin, and scarcely anyone who even knows such coins once existed. Its date and mint mark make the discovery unusually precise: it is from 1932, like his own, and bears the A for Berlin. The matching details make it not simply a second old coin but a counterpart to the object he already treats as a personal safeguard.

A Personal Talisman

The narrator’s reasoning about the coin is playful in form but serious in its premise. He imagines keeping the new coin as a second talisman. If one can ward off ninety percent of misfortune, he reasons, the remaining ten percent can be reduced by another ninety percent; together, the charms would block ninety-nine percent. He insists to himself that this is mathematics, not superstition. The arithmetic gives his faith a comic, orderly structure without making the need beneath it disappear: he wants protection from bad luck.

Finding the duplicate changes what that protection might mean. Keeping it would leave the narrator with two charms, but would leave the person whose trousers they came from without one. He considers the possibility that the other coin may not work as a talisman at all, then concludes that the unknown person needs a working charm badly enough to receive his own. The decision redirects the coin’s protective meaning outward: instead of accumulating luck for himself, he relinquishes the object he already trusts.

Exchange and Gift

The exchange is deliberate and unseen. The narrator takes his own four-pfennig coin from his pocket and puts it into the gray trousers; he keeps the coin he found. The person who lives there receives the narrator’s lucky charm without knowing it, and the narrator does not make the gesture into a transaction or seek acknowledgment. The coin’s passage therefore joins material transfer to an imagined act of protection: its recipient may never know that it was given, or that it was meant to help.

Afterward, the narrator walks back to Auerhaus. Only then does he notice the fruit trees in blossom, though he cannot tell whether they are cherry or apple trees until the fruit appears. Beyond their trunks, a light-green line of hedge marks the cemetery. The returned coin is followed by this quiet perception of spring and the cemetery together; the scene places an unannounced act of care within a landscape holding both growth and death, without explaining the connection for the reader.

The Coin and Auerhaus’s Economy

Elsewhere in the account, small transfers of goods sustain life at Auerhaus. The narrator’s mother brings food from the supermarket: partly filled crates of discarded apples or peppers and yogurt cups just past their expiry date. Frieder collects a large loaf of bread from the baker every Friday, paid for by his parents with grain. These provisions arrive through different routes—discard, family payment, and practical assistance—and help feed the household without making its kitchen fund secure.

Other contributions are more contested. Frieder steals coffee, wine, and other expensive goods at Penny, an idea Vera gave him; the proceeds do not make the household expenses disappear, and the narrator’s work at a chicken farm and half-orphan’s pension also go into the picture of how the kitchen is supported. Cäcilia refuses money from her parents. The narrator recognizes that this refusal protects her pride but makes things harder for the group. Household survival thus depends on unequal forms of giving and taking, not on a single, clean division between private property and shared resources.

Frieder eventually proposes that anything obtained for free should count toward the household fund, using the group’s own shorthand for stealing. Under his suggested rule, Vera and Frieder will teach the others how to steal, and the value credited to the kitchen will be half the shop price: a ten-mark packet of coffee counts as five marks. Vera describes the arrangement as increasing both private spending money and collective prosperity. Frieder also makes an exception for the delicatessen food he gets once a week at Kaufhof: that, he says, is a gift and will not be counted. The scheme makes the meaning of an object depend on how it was acquired and whether it is entered into the group’s accounts.

Against that shared accounting, the four-pfennig coin offers a smaller, unrecorded model of exchange. The narrator neither spends it nor credits it to the household; he gives it to an unknown resident as protection, with no stated return. Its value is not its buying power but the belief attached to it, and its movement expresses a form of mutual care that cannot be entered into Frieder’s half-price ledger. The coin’s destination remains uncertain, but the narrator’s choice is clear: the talisman matters most when it is passed on.