It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future, today and tomorrow become more doubtful overnight. An epidemic of fear, of naked need: lines of shoppers, long since an unaccustomed sight, once more form in front of shops, first in front of one, then in front of all of them. No disease is as contagious as this one. The lines have something suggestive about them: the women's glances, their hastily donned housedresses, their patient and careworn faces. The lines always send the same signal: the city—the big, stone city—will again be shopped empty. Rice, which was 80,000 marks per pound yesterday, costs 160,000 marks today, and tomorrow perhaps twice as much. The day after, the man behind the counter will shrug his shoulders and say, "No more rice." Well then, noodles! "No more noodles." Barley, groats, beans, lentils—always the same: buy, buy, buy. The piece of paper, the spanking brand-new bank note, still moist from the printers, paid out today as a weekly wage, shrinks in value on its way to the grocer's shop. The zeros, the multiplying zeros! "Well, zero. Zero ain't nothing."

They rise with the dollar: hate, desperation, need—daily emotions like daily rates of exchange. The rising dollar brings mockery and laughter: "Cheaper butter! Instead of 1,600,000 marks, it's only 1,400,000 marks." This is no joke; this is reality written seriously with a pencil, hung in the shop window, and seriously read.

It rises with the dollar, the haste to turn that piece of paper into something one can swallow, something filling. The weekend markets overflow with people. City police regulate traffic. The lines consume the produce stands. "I'll have two dozen turnips." "There's only one dozen." Once packed away and the money counted into the hand like at the train ticket window, the next pushes forward from behind: "Two dozen turnips." "There's only one... Next!"

Somewhere patience explodes. Resignation breaks. Not at the turnip man, who is a big fellow. And you also swallow the butcher's biting remark, that all cows have to have bones. You pay and stagger off. But then the girl in the dairy store, the one whose face is always pinched, whose way of speaking becomes even more finicky the fuller her store: this nervous milkmaid, she, she issues regulations: how to behave as a customer, shoving is rude, everyone should not shout at once. Otherwise, she cannot concentrate on the scale. "Come on, when am I going to get my butter?!" screams a woman. "Your butter? It's not your butter by a long shot. By the time you get to the front of the line, your butter will be gone." And then comes the umbrella handle, a response crashing through the glass cover on the cream cheese. And the cop standing watch outside pulls a sobbing woman from the store. There is an uproar. And charges are filed.